Gifted Gorgeousness SAL - August

Here we go with another GG SAL update. It's less than 3 weeks to my wedding, so I am quite busy with the preparations by now. We decided to do a Polterabend, which is a celebration before the actual wedding and very traditional around here. You basically celebrate with your neighbors and friends and it's mostly drinking and smashing porcelain (for good luck). We are planning a bbq party with a lot of people from work /university. Around here there is also a tradition called "Kränzen", where your neighbors make a long garland out of greenery and decorate it with flowers. The whole thing is then placed above your door, so every one sees that there is to be a wedding. Traditionally this happens very close to the wedding day, like one or two days before, but by now it often happens on the weekend before because it goes with a lot of drinking. Traditionally this is organised by the neighbors and the bridal couple doesn't know when it happens, but since we are doing a Polterabend on the weekend before the wedding (on the 31st), we think that the whole thing will happen then ;-)
Anyway, we are busy organizing stuff for that (drinks and food and so on). Apart from that we are learning to dance now (waltz) and it works better than we thought. We still have a way to go, but we are practicing almost every night (at least for half an hour) and I am confident that things will work out.
But this post is supposed to be about stitching! I worked only on my map of Middle Earth, but I did a lot on it! I did not only manage to finish page 8, I also did the first column on page 9. I went from here:

To here:

You can see the beginning of the Iron Hills now, wich is actually the last writing for this row! I am not at 63 000 stitches now, so I did l about 2 500 stitches during the last month - I just couldn't stop.

I hope that I will be able to get my butt up to work on a few other projects (like In the Moonlight, Candy Cane or Wolf Kiss) for the SAL this year, I only seem to be working on Middle Earth. Last but not least, there are plenty of other entries for the SAL this month and you can see them here =)
So this is all I have for this month, by the next entry I'll be married, I can't believe it! =)
Happy stitching =)

WIPocalypse - July

It looks like July is already over and it's time for another WIPocalypse update. I was doing the one-per-day-challenge last month, so I decided to wait until the end of the month to share my final update on that. The good news is that I met my goal for that challenge, at least stitch-wise. Unfortunately I did not manage to stitch every day on Crossing the Stream by Golden Kite, but on most. I think there might be like 5 days on which I didn't work on this, but overall, I am really happy.
You know I already shared a tiny update (like 300 stitches) on this at the beginning of the month, but I am sharing the official starting point for July again:

And I managed to stitch page 4, which is 3 350 stitches:

So we do have 13 467 stitches done now. I definitely putting this away for a while now, working on the 32ct was a bit exhausting and I need to make up my mind on whether I should continue with page 5 or go down and start row 2. The point is that I am working on this on my Qsnap and I don't want to damage my parked threads by moving the Qsnap over them. Another page might just fit, but maybe I will just go down.

The bad news for this month is, that I hardly stitched on anything else. I did two columns on Kriemhild and a bit on my Middle Earth and that's it. I mean the amount of stitches I did is fine, but I missed working on different projects and some days I really struggled because I wanted to get my daily stitches into CTS, but also stitch on something else. I really wanted to get more done on Kriemhild, I did those 2 columns at the beginning of the month and then the month was suddenly over.
I went from here:

To here:

I must add that I also participated in a readathon this month and putting a stitching-challenge and a readathon into the same month is definitely not for me. I had a few days where I didn't get around to stitch because I was busy reading and I still felt like I was not getting enough reading done to meet my goals. A book that definitely kept me from stitching was "The Priory of the Orange Tree" by Samantha Shannon:

First I must say how amazing this cover is! You can see that it's really shiny and the colors are super rich and pretty. I love the way the artist did the dragon, it looks really impressive and alive and the contrast to the background is amazing. I would definitely stitch it.

The story follows a lot of different characters. The story is set in different locations and follows different characters, but what connects all of them is the fear of the nameless one, an evil dragon (called wyrm) that tried to destroy the world a thousand years ago, but he and his wyrms were defeated and banned into the abyss. Legend has it, that as long as the house of Berethnet rules the queendome of Inys in the West, the nameless one cannot return. So we follow Ead at queen Sabran the Ninths court in the west, who tries to protect the queen from assassins who try to end her line, but her survival and the survival of her bloodline is essential for the worlds safety. While the people in the west fear all wyrms, people in the east distinguish between dragons (good) and firebreathers (bad) and we meet young Tane, who trained all her life to become one of the legendary dragon riders. The conflict between east and west runs deep, but when the nameless one begins to stir, they need to unite to defeate him.

I must say that this is a longer book, it's over 800 pages, but they just flew by. Samantha Shannon did a masterpiece with this one, such rich world building and a lot of background story. You know there are a few books that just follow a red line and everything the characters do is just to get to the final battle and that's it. But here have a world build around the story, we have twists and turns, a lot of character development, you even need to read a few hundred pages until you get what the priory is that is mentioned in the title. The story and the world are really complex and I am really happy that the author decided to write a longer book to develop all the ideas. This is a standalone, but on goodreads Samantha wrote that the world has more tales to tell and she would love to return to it, I really hope she does! 

Well, one of the best books I read this year, if not the best book and just needed to talk about this. If you like high fantasy and/or dragons, give it a try ;-)

The last thing left for this month is to answer this months question: How do you get yourself out of a stitching drought? Ah, good question. I don't get worried if I don't feel like stitching for a few days and especially if I just feel like doing something else (like read Priory...), I just do that and don't try to push me to much. If I am in a real slump, I try getting inspiration from blogs or Instagram or flosstube or something like that that and then I try to do something like "half an hour a day of stitching and if I really don't like it, I do something else" and that usually does the trick.

Last but not least (this post in longer then I thought) I am sharing this/last months link-up with you, so you can see how everyone else did in July.

And plans for August... Well, a few last things are left to do for my wedding in September, we are currently learning to dance (works better than we expected) and we still need to pick up a few things. As for my health, I am officially done with my medication, it has been over a week since I last took the pain killers. I still have a bit of pain sometimes, but it's getting better every day =)

Happy stitching =)