Hey hey everyone! Here we are again, time to continue my WIP Round-Up for Year of Finishes 2022. Remember, if you’re participating along with me, leave me a comment letting me know what you’re working on and leave a link to your blog if you have one so I can follow along with you – or join us in the Chronic and Crafty Facebook group to play along with me and others.
Remember how I said Sunday was my birthday and I wouldn’t be back for several days because I wanted some of that time to myself? Haha…enter flu! Yeah, Saturday evening I started feeling absolutely terrible. I woke up with a migraine, and with my migraines I get strong nausea (that’s a lot of times worse than the actual head pain). I also thought it was just a regular flare-up – I’d kept myself busy since Christmas, doing a lot of stuff, it wasn’t exactly shocking since I never wanted to turn it “off” to rest myself. And for a few hours I really thought that’s all it was. Then the fever, chills, and body aches hit me.
No, it wasn’t Covid. At least, I’m 99% sure it wasn’t Covid. There’s 1% of me who wonders simply because of the terrible headaches I’ve had with this and hearing that the Omicron variant that’s running wild in my local area comes with some infamous headaches. But…well, I’ve suffered with chronic near-daily migraines for something like three years now so that’s a stretch. I did have full sense of smell and taste – and how I know that is that on Saturday night when I got sick, the smell of dinner cooking very nearly made me upchuck. I suppose it’s possible that you can retain your sense of smell and taste while still being positive of Covid but it’s not something I hear about too often. Anyway, between that, the fact that my fever never got too high, and that I was able to breathe just fine and the majority of my symptoms broke within 24 hours, I’m not confident I need to be concerned it’s the virus. But regardless our house will be keeping our eyes out. I still haven’t felt too great the past few days, with continuing headaches and nausea (along with some throwing up) before bed. 🙄 But I think I’m getting there.
Let’s get into it shall we? So, last year, I didn’t do much cross stitching. Not like in previous years. I think I just got burnt out. I’m slowly finding my stitching mojo again, nowhere near before but I do pull it out every now and then, so here’s a somewhat comprehensive/not at all comprehensive list of what I intend to work on (and possibly finish) this year.
Coffee Break
I have tried and tried and tried to finish this one as the years go on. There’s just so many little details you don’t quite realize. I worked on it quite a bit in 2021 but just not enough to finish because I needed a break from it. I have reached the “over 50%” mark though, so maybe 2022 will be the year I find my mojo and finally finish it (perhaps later in the year). I wouldn’t count too much on it though, so really I’m just hoping that I find myself in the mood to get back to stitching it and make decent progress.
Dancing Auroras
Let’s be honest, this one shouldn’t even be on a list with “finishes” in the name because since I’m just finishing page 1 of like, 80, I’m obviously not going to finish. But once again the challenge isn’t about finishing everything, it’s about progress. And if I complete 1 stitch all year, that’s technically 1 stitch further than I was last year and that’s progress. So we’ll see how much I progress this year.
Animal Crossing SAL
This one is not a long-standing WIP but I’d prefer to not make it one. I got a late start on this one of course since I discovered it 8 or so months after it originally started, but I’ve been slowly working on it over the past couple months. Hoping to at least get half finished this year. But a full finish would be awesome.
Riolis Flowers
This kit was a prize from a large SAL hosted by Cross Stitch Frog Busters. I’ve never done a Riolis kit before but heard about them so much that I had to start right away. This one is pretty low on my priority list for the year.
A Treasured Time
Midway through the year, I put some pretty good effort into making a lot of progress on this one, which I did. I believe I managed to finish page 1 – which doesn’t sound like much but it’s thousands of stitches. Not a lot of hope I’ll finish this one this year, but still adding it to the list in hopes of some progress.
Waiting For…
This is actually an older file from my freebie folder that I started earlier this year. I legitimately can’t remember exactly where it’s from, or when I got it. I think I have the designer written down on the card in my project bag so if I do I’ll share that in a future post. But if I remember correctly, this freebie is no longer available. Anyway, this is a vaguely holiday stitch, and is actually pretty quick-going so far – I think I finished page 1 in 2 or 3 stitching sessions. I’m working on page 2, and 3 and 4 are very short partial pages. So the goal is to actually finish this one this year, because that seems realistic!
Wedding ABCs
This was a cute new kit I bought earlier this year when I was having fun exploring our new “big city” and my access to all the big box craft stores. I love this designer’s ABC samplers, I have several (including a crafting/sewing ABCs, and my WIP Coffee Break is by her as well). My husband and I had a wedding sampler that I made when I first started cross stitching but I believe it got lost somewhere in our move, so I thought this would be a fun one to do, and I love feeling a little sense of accomplishment when you can say you finished the “A” or “C” (or whatever) block. Another low priority finish for this year but it’s so fun you may see it quite a lot anyway.
Love Is…Books
Off topic but somebody tell me, would you think the title of this kit means that “love is books” – like books are love – or that since the top book starts with “love is…” and the rest of the books have the rest of the quote, that’s just the name of this picture of books? I guess it would depend on what kind of person you are and how much you love reading and books, I’m kind of on the fence. Anyway, another low priority stitch, but it’s a fun stitch so maybe my mojo will return on this one this year.
Everything Else
So needless to say, the above listed projects are not all my cross stitch projects. I still have probably 20+ WIPs in various stages of completion. I will not get to them all. I won’t even come close to finishing them all, even if I stitched exclusively all year for 20 hours a day – and we all know I won’t do that because I like to switch things up frequently. And some of my WIPs I’ve listed may get interchanged for older projects I find more “exciting” to stitch through the year as my mood changes (I’m actually considering switching some around right now) so in reality some of these I’ve said I hope to make some progress on may get none as older projects come back in my favor. I also have a couple kits that I so far haven’t started, and it sounds like fun to go ahead and start them. So this is not a committed list by any means. I have this box (shown) of WIPs in bags, and a second basket of old WIPs (not shown) in their own bags. Cross stitch is kind of just an area right now where I’m like “eh, if I get to it, I get to it”. We’ll see. Might be interesting to see whether cross stitching falls back in this year for me, because I’ve been pulling it out lately because it’s easy when I’m sick in bed. Stay tuned to see, I guess. 😛
So that’s about it for cross stitch WIPs to add to the list. I need to work through my boxes and see if I want to switch around any projects to active status, and I probably should update my projects on Stitchingly and my sidebar. (I try every few months to come around to see if anything needs updated there, even if I’m not motivated to post anything.) As for the rest of the Round-Up posts, I still have two more to come back and do – I have a ton of knit and crochet projects to add to the list, and then I have an “Everything Else” category. As you know I do many random crafts but most of them don’t deserve their own special post, so I’m going to throw all the rest of those WIPs into that category and make a post about that. Should be fun, because I anticipate a lot of chaos and confusion as I try to wrap my fibro fog addled brain around all the half-started and half-completed craft projects I have laying around – here, there, everywhere. Literally everywhere. Send help, guys. 😆
Oh, but! To offer up a happy ending! Look what I managed!
I organized it! Sorry for the dark photo – with migraines my bedroom is pretty dark 99% of the time to save me some agony. But you can get the gist of it. During the time I was sick it got even worse than it was before because I tried to pull out a few projects but had to put them away real quick after a few minutes because I would turn to feeling really bad really fast. But my husband helped me yesterday because it got so overwhelming. Most of it was a matter of putting things back where they belonged but it took a bit. The craft cart may get one more once-over to move in things I reach for often so that they’re easier to grab. This is still not perfect, as I’d love to have under the bed storage for some of my craft supplies. But! For now, at least this corner is better and doesn’t give me anxiety.
Be back soon with more projects to add to the ever-growing list!
Floss and Fibro 