Hall of Shame, Pt 2

One of my favorite ever blog posts was my Hall of Shame post, where I went over all my unfinished knitting projects and decided to finish or frog them. Since then I’ve done a really good job of keeping my knitting projects within a reasonable amount. I’ve currently got 5 projects on the needles, and since I finished working through the projects in that post, I haven’t had more than 8 projects at once. We are going to ignore that fact that it’s been more than 3 years and there’s still one of those projects that’s technically still in process….

Anyway, while I have been pretty great with keeping my knitting to a minimum, my embroidery/ cross stitch has expanded a bit. There’s lots of fun projects I want to work on, and sometimes I struggle to balance between knitting, embroidery, sewing, and just, ya know, relaxing. So, in order of oldest to newest, let’s talk about the needle and thread based projects in my life.

This tulips cross stitch is what I have been working on the most recently. I started this in late September 2021. It’s a pattern I got from a friend’s grandmother who was clearing out their stash of patterns. I am really loving how this is turning out! I have spent a lot of knitting club and coffee shop time working on this one, and while it will continue to be a long-term project for me, it’s been fun to see it keep building. I also LOVE how the backstitch with the darker pink thread really makes the tulips pop.

The next project in the timeline is this small little bee embroidery, which I bought as a smaller project to take on our trip to Seattle last summer. As you can see, not much has happened with it lol. I do want to continue doing more emboridery and different stitches than just cross stitch.

I started this small cat cross stitch last year as a gift to my roomate moving out, since it’s a tuxedo like her cat. And now it’s more than nine months later… oops. I’ll get to this one eventually lol.

This summer, when I was stage managing Head Over Heels, I decided to be a little insane and make some props, because apparently that’s what I do. There was a small scene in which 3 characters had to be embroidering, and I couldn’t resist throwing in some small inside jokes. The “Arcadia Sweet Arcadia” was just what we thought of first. Instead of “Home Sweet Home,” Arcadia is the name of the land in the show. I took a patttern with different words in the center and used my own. The small sheep one is for the character who is a shepard masquerading as an Amazonian, and the mop is for a servant character named Mopsa. I also did some pattern editing on this one, the pattern I found had some words that i didn’t need and I messed with the colors a bit. These three didn’t need to be finished to be used as props, and so they’re not. I have actually done a good amount of work on the Arcadia one to try and finish it, but…. uh…. I have no idea where it is currently. Like I have looked everywhere and it’s just missing. Oh well. I am going to try to finish the mop one during the next few months because I want to hang it on the door of the cleaning closet in the theater.

I had the idea to make magnets for the cast and crew of the current show I stage managing, which is called Zanna, Don’t! There is a lightning bolt motif and a lot of pink, so I started with this pattern which has a light pink outline and dark pink center. But I realized right away that this is way too big and I can’t make 8 of these in like two weeks. But I’ll probably finish this one as a little memento of the show.

So yeah, those are active embroidery projects! Not quite as much of a disaster as the 2020 knitting projects, but definitely something to keep in mind as I continue working on projects.