WIP Wednesday

I thought I'd use today to give a bit of an update as to what I'm actually working on, and also share a few recent finishes.

First of all I'll start with the photo at the top, it's Theresa Wentzler's Castle Ridge that I started last year on January 1st at the stroke of midnight. The last time you saw it it looked like this:

I picked it up again on Sunday and as you can see I have made quite a bit of progress since then - when I;ve finished the bit I'm working on now I'll have done ~1000 additional stitches. What I had done before was roughly 800 stitches. I plan on working on this till Saturday when I will pick up the next project, probably Mike's Mushrooms, but I'll update about that at a later date.

Before I picked this up on Sunday I spent around a week working on another project The "a border a week" better known in The Netherlands as "randje per week" I was planning on keeping up as best as I could but it wasn't to be, so many other projects pushed this out of the way. The last photo I have of this that was posted on the WIP page of the blog is this one: 

Made some time in the spring. I worked on and off on it in between other stuff when I needed something simple to work on. It now looks like this after last week's work on it:

The different motifs were ones I added myself, the butterfly and ravens are both from old magazine cuttings I have that were originally in other colours, the lizard I found on this site: amintkipattan.blogspot.com (linked to the page with the pattern) I'm not certain which language this is but the language of cross stitch is universal and I'm sure you will enjoy the patterns this designer offers too!

Another thing I have been working on recently is crochet. I am currently working on a purple and black hooded cowl for my oldest son. It doesn't look like much yet, but I'm only on the 4th round so that's to be expected.

I'm using Stylecraft DK special, the shade you see here is 1425, Emperor although it's a bit richer/darker in person. Purple is such a difficult colour to photograph. I'll be adding some details with the black I have of the same make and ending up with some rows of black too. It was mean and decided to be an infinity cowl, which I tried very hard to avoid, but somehow managed anyway. it has made the adding of the desired pattern more difficult but I'll muddle my way through. I started with a chain of 300 so it's pretty big.

Time for a couple of recent finishes!

First of all is the pesky backstitching issue I had with the spray of Jasmine when I used the colours in the pattern they just didn't show up at all, probably because I chose a green linen and not the asked for white Aida.

Ripping it out was so difficult it ended up in the drawer of doom and sat there till I unearthed it last weekend. I decided on the colours to use and I'm ok with the result but even now it's not as obvious as I'd have wanted, however I still dislike this piece as much as I did last time I worked on it, so disappointing. Interestingly enough the linen looks almost grey in this picture, which it definitively isn't in reality as it's a lovely pale green. This will now be moved to my completed list.

Then there is the ornament pattern I wanted to do for the Halloween SAL with Leonore and the gang, which didn't really go as well as planned due to the enormous amount of other things that needed to be stitched. When you last saw it it looked like this:

Some time in January I finally completed the last stitches, I'm not yet sure how i want to finish this so I'm leaving it as is for now.

Because I didn't want a stripy effect from the threads I'd worked the cross stitch area's in a circle instead of rows. I'm quite happy with the way this turned out.

That's all for now - see you next time!