Plans and WIPGO 2025

 

It's been a long while since my last post. Life quite got in the way with starting seedlings and planning a garden to working the garden and weeding and weeding and weeding. I'd like to say that all that work panned out well, but it didn't. The lack of rain, the bugs, birds, squirrels and chipmunks, deer and the dang ground hog left very little to harvest. This has probably been the worst year for getting much out of the garden. It seemed like I worked to feed the wildlife. 

Then there was the saga of the missing bell peppers - a mystery for sure. I was out the day before and there were quite a few that were nice and big and ready to be picked. I didn't want to get them then, since I thought the freshest bells would be the best for making stuffed peppers the next day. Well, I got everything around for making them, went out to the garden to pick them and they were ALL GONE! I mean ALL of them!!! I posted to my local homestead list and everyone there insisted it had to be human that would have stripped the plants like that. I don't know - but it is strange.

Our daughter came to visit for 8 days and went home on the 4th of July. It was so nice to see her, as we haven't seen her for 3 years. Way too long, but it's life. The visit was too short and we traveled around the state with her so that she could do something new and fun. She had a list of things she wanted to see. Unfortunately we didn't have enough time. Next time...

We also added a new addition to the family. A sweet 4 week old kitten appeared on our back patio with 2 siblings. No idea where they came from, but we couldn't catch them. That night, one was killed and the next, the other disappeared. We finally caught the last one and she's been with us ever since. She's a sweetheart. The vet gave her the age of 4 weeks when we took her in the same day we caught her. She was definitely small and needed bottle fed. She had blue eyes when we caught her, but they changed the next day. The vet was surprised to find she had no parasites, fleas or ear mites, leading him to believe someone dropped them off. Sad. She weighed just under a pound then. Now, she's 7 months old and a ball of energy!

Not much was done over the year for cross stitch or knitting. I was so busy with that stuff and trying to put up small batches of what we did get out of the garden, that I had no real time to do anything else. Ah well, there's always next year.

Speaking of next year, I've decided to join WIPocalypse and WIPGO next year and focus on my oldest started projects. I actually have one back from the 90's that really needs worked on. So many old ones that I loved at one time and have decided to either finish them or pull them from my pile. I'll be posting more about that in the near future.

WIP Focus - Cinnamon Bear

I was watching YouTube yesterday and have notice that many like doing "X" amount of starts in December with no intention of finishing any during this month. It's an interesting concept, but I'm not sure it's for me any more. I get a feeling of anxiety every time I look at my WIP list - especially since it's so old! That feeling I got again, after watching all the starts motivated me to pull out one of those WIPS. 

My focus piece today was "Cinnamon Bear" by Pamela Kellogg. The pattern can be found in the Just Cross Stitch 2001 Ornament issue. I have no idea when I started this guy and could not figure out why I never finished him, because I'm quite close to getting him done. Well, until I started working on him today. There's a lot of color changes and confetti stitching. It makes him look so awesome but is quite tiresome to try to figure out where I left off and when you have colors so close, to know exactly where you stitched. So I took and enlarged the chart and got my trusty highlighter out. Boy, does that make life much easier!!! I didn't get  a lot of stitches in, but did finish his foot, did the empty spots between hi eyes and a bit on the blanket and kitten. If I keep going, I could have this piece done by Christmas. I don't know if I'll put the border on. I have to check to see if I have the color needed. 

One thing I'm finding while looking at these old WIPs/UFOs is I have no idea what fabrics are used or in the case of HoHRH, I'm going to have to figure out if I used one strand or 2 to stitch. It's a bit of a challenge to see in the lighting when I put it on the bars. I'm not going to worry about that until I start stitching. This has made me realize that I need to start taking notes from now on. There's much to be said about keeping a record!