Zodiac Mystery weekend update - March - Pisces!

It was exactly almost a year ago today (almost = off by two days) when everything crashed and burned for me.  And so I stopped stitching, and blogging, and the issues I was dealing with took up all of my time and energy and left me in more than a little bit of a depressed state.   But, I bounced back, because that is what one does, and I'm happy to be back to stitching away and not having enough time for all of the things.

One of my bigger (meaningful) goals was to go back to working on my Zodiac Mystery from CloudsFactory!  I had stitched the inner ring/frame and  the first two months, and even though I have the entire pattern, I am going to stitch one sign every month and will hopefully have a sizeable happy dance at the end of the year.

13 Mar 20016

And I did it!

My little Pisces.   I stitched the planet (Mars, though that's not Pisces's planet) symbol, the constellation, and the characters.  I do like the idea of the square finish, so every quarter, I'll go ahead and tack that on.

I don't know why, but I have a heckuva time getting that fabric to come out well in photos.  It always seems to grey out or go denim looking (and wash out the rest of the colors, oh well).

The one thing I did find infuriating is how much I've frogged this piece.  I repeatedly had to frog and restitch the inner circles setting up the frame, and I've had to frog on each subsequent installment.   I frogged the constellation circle on this one twice, I don't know how many times I frogged the character circle, and the corner bits?  Not only did I frog each branch 2-3 times, when I discovered a major mistake in the corner bit, I just said "eff it" fudged it and moved on.  SO. MUCH. FROGGING.   I'm super glad I subbed regular DMCs for the rayon, because I would have probably chopped this into little bits if I had to stitch that much rayon.   Oh well, it's getting done.

I went ahead and stitched Aries's symbol because I had the white left over... and then I discovered that I really liked stitching the symbols and that they were fast and easy, and after all of the frogging, so be it, I went ahead and did the symbols for everyone

Chugging away on the moons

I'm enjoying the planets, too, and even though I should move on to whatever is next in the rotation, I think I'll go ahead and work on the planets/moons until I'm either just done with it, or get tired of stitching that central area.  On one hand, it should make stitching each month faster, on the other, I'm worried that if I keep up with my frogging misadventures, I won't have some nice and easy stitching to relax with.   I guess we'll just have to see.

And in other good news, I successfully gutted my TV without deadly injury.    Discharging the capacitor was easier than  I thought it would be and the only thing I did to harm myself was scrape up some knuckles as I was yanking out wiring.  I also took the top off of the cabinet.  It was made with particle board and was a bit saggy - I'll stop it off with some sturdier plywood.