Gifted Gorgeousness SAL - July

And here we are in the middle of July and it's time for another GG SAL update and this month am not only on time for the SAL, but I also have progress to show on two of my projects AND one of them is Santa! It's currently really hot here in Germany, we are having a wonderful summer (maybe not enough rain, the grass outside looks like hay...), so it was not easy for me to pick up Santa, but I wanted to get the second window section done (there really wasn't much to do...), so I gave myself a kick.
So I went from here:

To here:

As you can see, I even bothered to stitch Santas eyes, lol. He looks a bit less creepy now, but still a bit weird. I guess that the backstitching will help a lot, but since I am stitching this on a Qsnap and I am still moving around the frame, I am doing the backstitching at the end. You can also see that I added a few more stitches to the window cross. I am not sure about which section I will start next - the one with Santas body or the one with the Christmas tree, but I think I am going to start with doing more work on the window cross for orientation ;-)

The second project I worked on is- as every month - my map of Middle Earth. I added my 1000 stitches for this month, we are not moving along that fast with Middle Earth, but the stitches add up. My total stitch count on Middle Earth for this year is 8 000 and that's definitely something =)
I went from here:

To here:

The progess on this is still really slow, there is a lot of confetti in the mountains and that dark blob in the lower right corner is full of confetti (at least it's done for this row).I am now at 51 000 stitches, if I stick to my plan, I should do another 6 000 stitches this year, which brings us to a total of 57 000 stitches. The first row has 75 000 stitches, so getting that done by the end of 2019 would be awesome. I think I will try to squeeze in a an additional 1 000 or  2 000 stitches this year, so I can meet my goal for next year =)

Well, this is all I have for this month, not to much progress, but every stitch counts =) I have a few days off soon and I think I will pick up my Wolf Kiss then, so I can add at least a few stitches to them for my August update =)
I nearly forgot to include the link-up for this month, but here it is =)

Happy stitching =)