First update o' the new year!

So, like any insane stitcher, I spent the new year holiday stitching (mostly).

What's really funny is that we've got a weird work schedule going on right now.   Last week, we worked Monday, Tuesday and Friday (Christmas Eve and Christmas day we had skeleton crews, which didn't include me as I wasn't on the rotation for those days).   Then we had the weekend, and this week we have another Monday/Tuesday/Friday work week.  Except that I was on the rotation for New Year's Eve (Wednesday).   I work the holiday like I do any weekend I'm working (again, we have skeleton crews for the weekend which we rotate).

So I worked Monday, Tuesday, and half day Wednesday.   So Wednesday felt like the weekend to me.   And I didn't work yesterday, so today feels like Monday.  Only it's Friday, so I only have to last 8 hours.

So happy Monday, Friday, New Year!  (hah)

This was what I worked on for New Year's Eve.    It's another Zelda piece, so I definitely have a gaming theme going on.    I'm doing it as a gift for a friend, and I'm doing it in all Petite Treasure Braids.   Unfortunately, though I calculated out the stitch count and I know it should fit on a fat quarter, it looks like this fat quarter is too skinny to finish it off (oops, should have measured the fabric).   I'm currently thinking of how to rectify it without just starting over.  (again, it's from SpriteStitch)

Please excuse the dog hair.  White heavy shedding dog (that likes to sit with me while stitching) + black fabric = fail.   Plus, a little bird told me he found her using this as a pillow (/lesigh)

The count so far?  2 cards of PTB for the triangle.
There should be two more triangles.

And here's the progress I made on the Stained Glass Piece:

I was going to do the black and then color everything in... but then I remembered how much I hate moving my qsnaps around (I'm just really lazy), so I thought I would do the black of a motif/area and color it in... and then I discovered that even though I have approximately 3 bazillion skeins of DMC, I managed to not have three of the colors for that little medallion.   I don't even know how that happened.  Thankfully Michaels is next to my park and ride lot.

At FIRST I was really unhappy with the coverage, but when I hold it out, it's fine (forest/trees).   But then I read Leonore's genius idea to do the black as full x's, since that part of the design isn't actually the stained glass and I'm giving it some serious thought.    Though when I look at it like this, I'm fairly happy with it.   I think I might fill in the rest of that corner and then make my final decision.

I'm occasionally having to pick out a stitch here or there, because I've been working on linen/evenweaves for so long, I just automatically stitch over two and skip a hole now and again.

Spurred by the fact that I knew there was a lot of black involved, and I'm tired of buying black floss (I'm looking at you, Ferret Knot), I bought a 500gm cone of black DMC.   The 100gm cones come in a lot of colors, but as far as I can tell, I can only get the 500gm cones in a few (black, white, red).  But I really just needed it for the black anyway, so I Primed it.

And, finally, I did decide to go ahead and start on the CloudsFactory Zodiac mystery piece.    I got not just January's part, but the whole frame as well, and I like getting that all stitched (if anything, just to make sure I've got my stuff centered right on my fabric), and I'm not saying that I had to frog, but if I didn't have to frog, I'd have 6 of the 12 circles done instead of 3.   And I did decide to throw all of the satin floss out.  I was so unhappy just a few stitches in, I decided to switch to regular floss. I'll get that pic eventually.

But here, have a picture of Mona, the shedding white-haired wonder, hard at work on New Years Day.

Oh, AND I had fun updating the blog.  More pages and things ready to roll for 2015!