Goals – Feather Stitching

It’s been a loooong time since joining in with the WIPocalypse. Hopefully this year sees me back on track again with my stitching and I can finally see a few projects getting some love … and maybe even a finish or two? I’m going to try to keep my goals really minimal this year, though, I’ll be happy just to make any progress on WIPs – but it wouldn’t be a new year without setting at least some goals.

My crafting goals for 2024 are:

Progress on at least 12 WIPs (helped by the WIPGO challenge) – progress can be 1 stitch, 1 strand of thread, 1 day or 1 week, as long as it’s some sort of progress
Sew an item – whether clothing, quilting or finishing
Work on a crochet item WIP
Find a good balance to work on both needecrafts and papercrafts/cardmaking

To kick off the new year, I managed to pick up an old canvaswork WIP, Lahaina Breezes by Laura J Perin. I was supposed to work on my WIPGO projects in cells 9 and 22 but they didn’t call to me – I figured I can just swap my numbers around and work on any two projects each month initially while I’m continuing to get my stitching mojo back again … and Lahaina Breezes felt like it needed some love. Here are the before and after photos after a few days work. My thumb is sore from pulling the needle through the back of the stitches, and I’ve run out of the main thread, so it’s being put aside again for now … but gee I’m happy with the progress on this one!

I’m adding a gallery of all projects sitting on my WIPGO board and how they looked at the start of this year – hopefully 2024 will see them all get a bit of progress and love.

English Garden Sampler by Teresa Wentzler

My goodness, this is probably the easiest annual review I’ve ever done, as I only worked on two projects!

I started the year in January hopeful that I’d get back into my stitching again, but my mojo was short lived and only lasted a few hours – I did, however, manage to complete all the letters on this canvaswork cushion by The Stitchsmith called Aroha so it wasn’t all bad (even if I only had 1 1/2 letters needing to be stitched).

The next time I did any stitching was late last month in December, where I got a sudden urge to stitch some of the blocks of Banded by Bargello by Kathy Rees. I realised I hadn’t downloaded the final part of the chart before I flew to NZ to care for Mum, and no longer had access to the email address I’d originally used, but Kathy kindly helped me out by sending me the missing parts. I think working on this project has helped me to get my mojo back a bit. It reminded me just how much I love working on canvaswork pieces, especially when the blocks are small and easy to count. This is such a beautiful piece of work, photos will never do it justice, I think. Here’s the before and after. The ‘before’ photo is closer to the colours in real life. It was so nice to put needle through canvas again, especially on a project that was really calling my name loudly.