Gifted Gorgeousness SAL - April

Just a quick update for the GG SAL (which was due 4 days ago).
Thank you for the well wishes regarding my MiL - she is doing sort of better, which means that she thinks that she is completely fine and can do anything and most of the time we are worried that she might get herself hurt by doing something she is not supposed to do, we had another long and exhausting discussion about driving a car when you take strong medication (and the leaflet says that you really shouldn't drive a car), but she won't listen to anybody (not the doctors, not her family and certainly not "her children"). Well, we are visiting her on Easter Sunday, I hope there won't be to much drama. While I am visiting my parents on Easter Monday, I am spending today and tomorrow with some friend and woooosh, weekend is over. On Tuesday I need to go to hospital for a few days due to my (by now chronic) pain.
I met the doctor on Monday and she was really nice, Due to the Easter holidays a lot of doctors were having some time off, but never the less she took a lot of time to listen to my problems, all the examinations, all the doctors I went to, how I am coping with the fact that I have pain all the time and so on. She said it would be the easiest thing was if I could come to hospital for a few days, they have one or two more examinations (for one of them you usually wait like 2 months - I am doing that on Tuesday... benefits of going to hospital) and start some treatments, also they want to take a look at my medication, I am feeling very tired and dizzy and sometimes have trouble to concentrate and she thinks with a few adjustments they can reduce these unwanted things. Another goal is to finally find out what is wrong. She says it sounds like crps to her, but the problem is that it is a diagnosis by exclusion. But then so many things have already been excluded and the whole process of me running to yet another doctor to check something just needs to end. Therefore I am sort of happy that I am going to that hospital, the doctor was positive that she can help me and so am I.

Well, this was a pretty long text on my unwell-being, so let's move the nicer things in live - stitching!
I only worked on one project for this month and that is my Map of Middle Earth. I originally wanted to do 2 000 stitches in celebration of the GG SALs birthday, but I only managed 1 000, which is still better then nothing and moves us to the 60k mark. I went from here:

To here:

It's getting really complicated to take a decent picture of this - after all it's 60cm (about 24 inches) wide by now!
Well, that is all I have for this month, last but not least you can find this months link-up here.

To those of you who celebrate Easter, I hope you have a wonderful time with your family and a few nice days off =) And I hope that everybody gets a few stitches in, I am planting myself outside in the garden now, the sun is finally back!
Happy stitching =)

WIPocalypse March

I always feel extra bad when my WIPocalypse post moves to the next month. I was just so busy over the weekend, you know all those adult things like grocery shopping and cleaning that you just don't have the time to do during the week add up then a day is gone. My future mother in law broke her shoulder like two weeks ago and we went shopping with her (it could be worse, she doesn't need surgery and she is healing well, but she can't drive and lift things and so on). She is taking a lot of medication, especially pain killers (no was around them sometimes) and she is acting a bit odd these days, she just can't keep her thoughts in order and when you talk to her she keeps mixing things up... I really hope this will get better once she is of the pain killers, shopping with her was really exhausting and took ages... After we were done, we went to pick up some plants for the garden and after I planted them, the day was nearly over and I was completely done... I didn't feel well on Sunday, so I didn't manage to put up a blog post (again). Anyway, my garden is looking better now (especially since I picked up some more extra ugly decoration - I own two beer drinking frogs now, my neighbor was really impressed when she saw them) and I am getting this post done now!
The link-up for this month is already pretty crowded, so it's really worth taking a look over there to check out more updates :)

This months question is "What newer designers and product creators (fabric or floss dyeing, etc) out there have you discovered and recommend?". Well, I didn't discover any new designers since last time, I tent to stitch the same stuff every time... Maybe because of the trouble with my hand, I didn't buy to many new things and didn't spent so much time researching new designs and designers...

But now we are coming to my progress for March. March was a funny month, I took part in the 1-stitch-a-day challenge and except for two days, I really managed to pick up my project QS Paddys Luck every day. I decided instead of doing one stitch, I am stitching one square per day (130 stitches for the first 8 days and 100 stitches for the rest of the month). There were a lot of days where I didn't stitch on anything else, so I didn't feel like making to much progress over the month. Apart from Paddy, I worked on two other projects, but first I want to show my progress on Paddy. I went from here:

To here:

I added 100 extra stitches so I would have 4 columns (and a partial) done by the end of the month. In total I did 3 430 on Paddy, I didn't realize it was so much! 100 stitches per day really add up! I am also just 2 000 stitches short of a row finish here, so that is one goal for April =)

The second project I worked on is Starlight by David Hoffrichter. I didn't stitch on this for ages - you know I love the design, but due to all the confetti it is really slow to stitch...
Before:

And now:

I finished page 4 and it took ages. It really doesn't look like much, but especially those small bubbles were confetti hell. I was sort of happy when I was done with the page, which makes me a bit sad because the result is really great. I did a total of 1680 stitches, which is still better than nothing ;-)

The third project for this month is - just as every month - my Kriemhild. The plan is to do half a page per month, but I only managed to stitch two columns (and a total of 1520 stitches). I went from here:

To here:

I plan on doing another column before I put it away to hopefully catch up with my progress. In fact I hope to be able to finish page 37 for next month. 

This is all I have to show for this month. Maybe I will also start another small Mill Hill kit, I am wondering if I might still have one of those beaded eggs (whenever I order Mill Hill kits, I pick up a ton and then I forget about them...). 

So until next time,

Happy stitching =)