WIPocalypse - March

It looks like March is already over, time has flown by again! I hope all of you are well and well supplied with stitching supplies.
We don't have a total lock-down here in Germany, but everyone is advised to stay home and not physically socialize as much as possible (and you are not allowed to meet with more than one person outside, unless you live with them). Me and my husband are working from home now, since the university is closed (at least until 19th April), so we are home most of the time. Lucky us, we are introverts. I am reading, stitching and working and my husband is playing computer games and working. So far, we and our family and friends are healthy (even one of our friends is being tested for corona, he works in a hospital and one of his patients has been diagnosed with corona after he treated him, but he is not showing any symptoms as of now). My mother seems to be a bit more reasonable now. She feels a bit lonely at home, but she seems to stay at home now.

Anyway, back to topic - Wipocalypse! The original posting date was two days ago, but I did the one-per-day challenge and wanted to finish the challenge, which I did =) But first a short reply to this months question. Did I ever adopt a project from someone else or give a project up for someone?
No :D That just never occurred :D
If you are interested in more updates for this month, feel free to visit this months link-up page here.

So we can start with my progress for this month. First I have my work for the one-per-day challenge. I chose to work om Crossing the Stream by Goldenkite and went from here:

To here:

I stitched page 5 and I am now at 16 817 stitches. Since I reached the width of my Qsnap now, I will move to the second row of pages next. I don't want to damage my parked threads with the Qsnap and page 6 looks pretty boring anyway. Since the olympic games have been moved to 2020, Measi is inserting another one-per-day challenge in July and I think about featuring this one in that again. This project also qualifies for my non-Haed in March ;-)

I really loved this one-per-day thing, so I think about doing another challenge in April for myself (maybe Paddys Luck? Or Cliffside Beacon?).

I worked on two more projects. First up is Danielle by Sara Butcher (Haed). I did not work on my Geishas in March because I felt an urge to take out Danielle with her lovely springish colors. I went from here:

To here:

I did 3 columns, aka 2 400 stitches, and crossed the halfway point on the first row. It really was a joy to stitch on her and I found the bird! I love the contrast between the light yellow and the more intense blue/red/green colors. All the parts that look white on the picture are actually Rainbow 000 and it's soooo sparkly. Love it!

After working on Danielle, I worked on my map of middle earth for the GG Sal, by now I managed to finish the first row of pages (I need to make a post on that). Since I think that I did a great job with that, I thought it ok to part with my plan to rotate through all my projects once and picked up a project on which I already worked this year - SSMC Once upon a Fairytale by Aimee Stewart! I just wanted to work on it and it's soooo much fun! I went from here:

To here:

The lantern took ages to stitch, but it was still a lot of fun and I am so happy with the result =) I did 2 rows, so another 1 300 stitches. Since it is only two more rows to finish page one, I will stitch with this one for a few more days.

I hope you and your loved once stay healthy and (as) happy (as possible right now).
Happy stitching =)

Gifted Gorgeousness SAL - March

Here is my short update for the GG SAL this month. I really wanted to finish the current row on my Map of Middle Earth, but I am still 1 000 stitches short (but I plan to start the last column tonight). Still I am happy with my progress, I went from here:

To here:

The last days were a bit chaotic here, I guess a lot of you are one way or another affected by the corona outbreak. I live in the part of Germany that currently has the most cases. The university is closed from Wednesday on, but we were told to work at home on Friday and more and more shops are closing now and honestly, the whole thing feels like a science fiction / dystopian novel now. Last autumn my book club read "Not forgetting the whale" by John Ironmonger, which deals with exactly the same situation. The main character is building an emergency stock for village where he lives with food and stuff and two things are funny/ interesting:
First, he does stock up hand soap, but I am pretty sure he says that he pays attention to this because people usually forget about such basic things.
Second, he does not talk about toilet paper hoarding.
Honestly, shopping for groceries is not fun these days, people have been going mad for a few weeks now and since most parts of the country announced that the schools are closing, it has gotten worse. I am currently wondering why hand soap is a new thing for so many people and I recently read that the average person in Germany uses 46 rolls of toilet paper PER YEAR and I have seen people buying such amounts now... On the other hand there are a lot of people making fun of the situation. After a lot of people got infected in Berlin after going to discos, there was a recommendation not to go out to party, avoid big parties and so on. This resulted in a couple of people hosting and going to "corona parties" in cologne because they were annoyed by those  "recommendations"... I mean are you kidding me?!?! Also the football games here were cancelled, so thousands of fans met in front of the stadium to demonstrate for the games to go on... Such behavior is (in my view) egoistic and really makes me angry, I completely understand why social life is forced to close down now, because common sense is just not common enough around here.
I myself am not in the high risk group, by a lot of people around me are (my mother in law, my mother, my neighbors) and if I can help protecting them by cutting my social life down, I am more than happy to do that. Sometimes you need to leave your home to do stuff (like shopping groceries, going to a doctor, there are a lot of jobs out there that are important to keep our daily life going), so we just need to cut down where we can to limit the risk of spreading the infection and help flattening the curve.
I am currently a bit worried about my mother in law, she clearly is in the high risk group and everyone knows and accepts this, well, except her... We called her to offer to do the grocery shopping for her or pick up medication for her, but she says she is fine and doesn't want help. On the one hand she is a grown adult and I should respect her decisions, on the other hand she has gotten very ill in the past due to false pride (she  is quite famous for not listening to her doctors when they tell her to cut back)... Has anyone of you similar experiences or maybe a few tips?

Ah I'm sorry, I didn't plan to write such a long text on such a nasty topic, but I have a lot of this going through my mind now. I just hope all of you are save and healthy, please follow the advice to cut down your physical social contacts, I know it's annoying, but we all need to stand together now. Remember there are lots of things to do when you hermit - stitching for example! And if you don't want to stitch alone, have a stitch-a-long via skype ;-) My heart goes out to all of you, keep you heads up and you needles high =)
Happy stitching =)

WIPocalypse February

Time for another WIPocalypse update and I seem to be sort of in time (by accident). I thought I messed this up again. On Friday I noticed that the last Sunday of the month would have been the 23rd, so I wanted to make a post. Then I was confused, that there was no link-up, until I remembered that we had a leap-day check-in this month, so I was actually a day to early and decided to do my post on Saturday, but then I was busy helping a friend move and I was invited to a birthday party, so Saturday was suddenly over and now I am a day late for the check-in. But here we go ;-) You can find all the other entries at this months link-up page. 

I had a super productive month, I stitched a lot and I read a lot (nearly 4200 pages and on top of that 2 full audiobooks and a partial one), so I am overall very happy.

As for this months topic, it's about the "leaps" we made in stitching. I don't really know how to answer this question. A big leap for me was to start my first Heaven and Earth Designs, we all know how big those are. Also I was still a student and living on my pocket money at that time, so kitting the supplies up for this was a huge expanse for me (and not an easy decision) . Maybe another leap was my first supersize project (Ride of the Yokai), I never did such a huge project before and I needed to work on 32ct because (at that time) this would have been the only way to fit the project on my frame. But I must say that I got used to the 32ct pretty soon and I am now very happy I made that leap.
A leap that is still before me is to start a Golden Kite with blenden threads. I have a few GK in my stash and I would love to start one of them. The problem is that he projects are not only quite big (and since I would need to stitch with two threads, I would use a 22ct or lower count fabric), but the amount of blended colors is huge. The total color count is around 200 and more than 100 are blended, I am still thinking about how to organize this and kitting such a project up would be quite expensive as well. If I make my leap here, you will learn about it here ;-)

But let's get to this months progress, I am eager to show you what I did =)
First I worked on The Silence After by Chris Ortega (Haed). This was my new year start in 2018, after I bought chart and material pack pretty soon after the release. I did 4 000 stitches and then this sat in my wip pile, so it was time to work on it again. Here is the last update you saw (in Febrary 2018):

And here is where I got to:

I stitched 4 columns, so 3 200 stitches and I am very happy with this. Stitching the tree was a bit dull, but I loved working on the sky behind the tree. There was a nice amount of confetti and I love how the smaller trees in the back turned out.

The second project I worked on was Supersized SK Iris Keeper by Josephine Wall (Haed). When I started this in 2015 I stitched on this regularly and made good progress, but then it disappeared in my wip pile as well. So it was more than time to take this out again and I went from here:

To here:

I did 4 columns on the second row, so a bite more than 3 000 stitches and I loved stitching this lovely swirl on color there =).

Last but not least, I worked on a project that is not a Heaven and Earth Designs again (still going strong on that plan). I originally wanted to work on Aurora Cabin, but when I went to my cupboard to take it out, I came across "Geishas" from the Maia collection (Anchor) and I just wanted to work on it. I started this for Stitchmaynia in 2018, but I didn't stitch more than one of the Geishas heads then. Last time:

And now:

So I started dressing that Geisha in her lovey yellow kimono and I love how this turns out. Compared to a haed there are only a few colors, but I love the shading they create. The project is still on my frame and I am not sure if I feel like switching projects yet, so I think I will work on this for a additional day or two.

So this is all the progress I made in February, as I said before: I am super happy =)
Since today is 1st March, this means the start for the first WIPocalypse challenge in 2020. It's another 1 per day challenge, I participated in them last year and had a lot of fun. For March I am going to work on my Golden Kite project "Crossing the Stream" (I already did that last year) and again, I plan to stitch one square (so about 100 stitches) per day. I am going to post regular updates (about twice per week) on my Instagram (@lady_stitchalot), so feel free to follow me there, but I hope to my a mid month update on this here as well.

I hope you all had a productive month as well.
Happy stitching =)