Sew Dance

My current progress on my frogs. Several things happened this week. Tuesday, my phone dropped onto the driveway, landing screen down and it cracked. I need to find a place to replace it. Thankfully everything else on the phone is functional. My rosebush is in bloom. A bit later than usual this year due to the weather. And finally, my partner and I participated in a competition yesterday. We got a 3rd and a 2nd in the Samba, Cha Cha, Rumba rounds and won both Jive contests.

I'm late on my update again. I have a really good reason though. I spent Sunday finishing up my tailoring on my fringe dress and then made a shirt. I'm having trouble with the hem on the top otherwise I'd have a picture of it. I may make bias binding and finish it that way. On Thursday, I finished the over 2 stitching of my dragon. I then started on the over 1 Chinese characters. By the end of Saturday I had a little over one to finish so I decided to wait, thinking I could finish it up after I got back from the competition the next day. We made top 24 and the quarter-finals for silver latin. But given the amount of entries and how long it was between the heats, they were running in level order rather than finishing up newcomer/bronze before starting silver/gold, I didn't get home as early as I thought. Therefore, I had to finish the characters today. Now onto the backstitching! I did buy more fabric, but it was one piece of denim as I'm going t...

I somehow managed to work on The Accolade for a week. Barely. On Thursday I got tired of it and switched projects. But I did manage to get down to row 118. I tried to hold on to finish 120 but couldn't. 13 rows until the end of the 2nd row of pages. Say hello to TW's Celestial Dragon. Or rather at the moment a tiny hint of dragon and most of the upper left corner border. For only using 29 DMC colors only 8 of those are actually used as solid colors. Everything else is blends. Update on my dancing. Friday, as I may have mentioned was my first competition with my new partner. We placed 17/23 in silver latin. I thought we should've at least made it to the semi finals but we didn't. Back to the studio for practice. A bit of good news, my mom bought me a new dress for next time. Similar in style to the roses one I made but leopard and I didn't have to spend time making it. My mom took video and I will edit it soon.

I seem to be a bit all over the place this week. Let me walk you through it. Sunday, I have declared this day to be for 'insanity'. I shall try and keep this up. So Monday, I picked up a new cross-stitch, Mystical Wizard. More on that later but here are the colors. Wednesday, I decided to work on one of my sewing projects. A 17.5" stuffed Christmas tree. I was going to make the 12" one but I had enough fabric if I ignored the included cutting diagram and got away with 1/8" less. But come Thursday, I was tired of my cross stitch. There's only so much I could take of stitching blue on blue, and mainly two colors of blue. Of course the upper left is the least interesting part color-wise of this piece. So I switched to The Accolade. I'll include the last photo I took of it (with my old phone) because I didn't get that many rows finished. But not bad for only two days.   And as today is Sunday, I worked on Insanity again. And...

Not much craft progress this week, again. My sleeve It's almost done though. I have added to my craft stash though. Despite my saying earlier that I wouldn't buy any more cross-stitch this year, Golden Kite's sale was too hard to resist. I procured the following patterns which I probably won't stitch for quite sometime... Midsummer Eve The Oriental Dragon's Garden The Arts - Poetry The Arts - Painting The Arts - Music The Arts - Dance The end of the Ball The End of the Song I am Half-Sick of Shadows The Kittens Recital The Crystal Ball On Top of the World I have 17 more on my wishlist and that's after I eliminated several that I felt I didn't like as much as when I first chose my patterns. Then today I stopped by Joann's because they had a one day sale on Butterick and vogue patterns. I went in for the patterns, they didn't have the newly released winter collecti...

My latest fairy and my first Mirabilia has been started. I did not use my "ready to go" spreadsheet with a random number to choose this one. I had wanted to start it for a while but at the time didn't have the specialty threads. For the moment, the large gaps on the wing is one particular variegated thread which I'll fill in later. I'd rather do them all at once so I can remember which end of the thread I'm supposed to match. As for the smaller gaps, those will be filled in later with beads. I went to a social dance on Wednesday night. Despite not being very active the past 6 months, I actually wasn't as out of shape as I thought. I had fun and the place was less than 15 minutes from my house. I finished one of my summer courses. Well, at least physically going to class. I have my research paper to turn in by July 5th, but I'm hoping to have it done before the 4th. If anyone would like to give me a random number between 1 and 31, I will us...

I finished page 3 & 4 of In the Garden. Given there are 16 pages to the chart, I'm now a bit over 1/4 of the way finished with the piece. But I will not be continuing with page 5. I made a stash splurge. I ordered this from abc stitch as it was on clearance: And also these from sew and so. The last three were designs I had wanted for a while and they complete my John Clayton dancers collection. At least until he releases another one. Anyway, they're here and have been tempting me for days. So I started Waltz earlier today. Remember the lovely skein of purple/green yarn I showed you last week? I made a ball out of it. The colors are less appealing in this form. But still interesting. The 'ball' itself, it's more a cylinder at this point, is about 4 inches in diameter and 5 inches long. I'm just glad it's fingering weight and not worsted.

I know I usually post on either Saturday or Sunday but I delayed until today thinking I could finish the backstitching. I had some unforeseen events take away my stitching time (a cold and trying to actually watch Citizen Kane for class). I should hopefully be finished this weekend. Which makes me start thinking of what I'm going to work on next. I can either start a new project (Sebastian with a fan perhaps?), go back to my insanity piece, or crochet some more scarves. Which reminds me, I really should take better photos of those two afghans and put them on my etsy shop. Classes are going well although I'm still not too thrilled about the 4-5 hours breaks I have twice a week. I've been looking into dance classes to fill those.

Well, maybe not new on the cross-stitch front. Still working on The Accolade. I finished 11 more rows this past week. The sleeve has a lot of color changes. I now have 109 rows completed out of 425 making me about 25% complete on this piece. Another 3289 stitches completed and an estimated 380 hours of work so far. I don't know how much longer I'll keep working on this piece. The dark background is starting to get to me but at least by going across all 6 pages it's kept my attention. There are way too many pure background pages with nothing interesting going on in them in this piece. I went dancing for four hours last Sunday. Ended up not being able to move well until Thursday when the muscles around my hips/butt stopped hurting. I realize they end up being sore when I'm not using proper technique or am dancing on bent knees for a while. I may end up going to this party while I'm going to school unless I can find a practice partner. Tuesday is the start of cl...

I finished Sebastian with Roses. Isn't he cute? I had my first and final dance lesson of the year the other day. At least for a while. Between going back to school and no income, it's hard to pay for dance lessons. I'm going to miss it but I will be trying to find some way to keep dancing, even if I'm not taking lessons. I came home to find Onyx on my computer chair. If I hadn't turned on the light, I might have sat on her. This morning I found her sleeping on the floor vent of my parents room. Silly kitty. I was crocheting a small order of scarves today. I should be finished with them later tonight. I put some more thought into my stitching goals for the year. I've decided to work on The Accolade (I noticed GK released a new version that is lighter and includes the upper window) and my insanity piece. I'm also going to try to finish Peacock Tapestry but I have to be in the right mindset to start that one again due to have to frog almost al...