New Year's Eve!

Hello everyone! Hard to believe it's the last day of 2024! It's time for my annual look back at this year. I also have progress to show, a finish, and plans so let's do this first.

Bertha Mae Brown is finished! I took the last stitch on December 10...

By Chessie & Me. The color of the fabric is darker than the picture and the reds are not as bright as shown. The designer always has specialty stitches in her pieces and Bertha had her share. Satin, eyelet, and smyrna stitches, I'm losing my fear of doing eyelets! She's so pretty!

After Bertha, I picked up Jenny Bean's Halloween Sampler by Shakespeare's Peddler...

Lots of progress here. I've run out of Black Crow floss for the words. I raided my WIPs, kitted projects but no extra skeins. So she's in time out until I can buy another skein. 

Next WIP is Sweet Autumn Vine by Threadwork Primitives...

I'm using a mystery 36ct fabric with the called for flosses. Lots of changing floss for the 1 or 2 stitches needed in the vine and in the big flower. Patience, grasshopper! When I'm done with Jenny Bean, I'll show a closeup of the border where there were lots of doodads scattered amongst the border; I just put the big girl panties on and dove in! The big girl panties are still on as I work on the Vine. I ran out of the Espresso Bean floss, the dark stitches, but found an extra skeins in my stash. I'll keep working on this one until midnight tonight.

Update time!

Whew! Finishes for this year came to 14, probably the lowest since I've been keeping track. In my defense I had that arm injury in March or April. That was unpleasant. It took at least 3 weeks before I could spend more than a few minutes stitching. 

My WIP count is down too! Don't know how that happened😆 two times a year I look at my WIPs and decide if I'm still in love with them. I think a lot of my starts are FOMO. I start them and then months down the road I look at them and I'm just not interested. I have 18 WIPs as of 12/28. I can't even remember the last time the count was below 20! No worries though, my plans for 2025 are going to create a lot of WIPs!

I turn 61 this next month so I'm starting 61 projects!! Lol, are you okay? Needing smelling salts?! You read it right. I have enough projects to keep me stitching for 2 months. I'll start one piece once a week. I have 4 lined up already for January. I thought this would be a good way to put a dent in my PDF pile. I'll have big stuff, little freebies, small to medium PDF designs. At midnight, I'm starting a sampler. I won't show what these will be but I'll post after 2 weeks of stitching. I'm liking my system of posting twice a month. I stitch a lot so I always have lots to show for each post. Who knows, I might just throw my hands in the air and go back to my WIPs!

I'm in a couple Facebook groups that focus on samplers. One run by Krista Gramer is having a Tom Foolery SAL for 2025. Tom Foolery is a sampler designed by HATS and I jumped on that bandwagon and bought the PDF but I've lost it! Haha! However, I got to thinking that it was a FOMO purchase🤦🏻‍♀️ugh, FOMO will be the death of my bank account! I lost all the hype for it and won't join in. I like my 2025 61 starts.

I also update my books read...

and 4 books was all I read. One is a Diana Gabaldon novel and that alone took me 7 months to get through!

I kept to my 2024 plan to not join SALs and to stay off the Goodreads reading challenge and glad I did. This 61 starts will be my only 'structured' stitching in '25.

I did go to the Jingle Ball and bought a few things. My bigger purchase was in Heartstrings Samplery table. I bought a piece of linen and 2 charts. I bought PDFs from HOD, Tiny Modernist, and Stacy Nash. I also joined in a group from the Southwest at the Ball. I'm still too squirrelly to join in on the speed dating at the Ball though! Next year, I think I'll get out of my comfort zone and give it a try. 

I think this is it! I feel like I'm forgetting something though.  Oh Christmas! I went to my daughter's for Christmas. It was me, her, the boyfriend, roommate, and 3 dogs! The daughter and her boyfriend bought me a Samsung tablet among other gifts, and I've been having fun on that and getting to know it. My iPad officially died in the Fall and with it a whole bunch of stitch PDFs. I was more sad about losing those PDFs than I was over the iPad itself! It's fun watching flosstubes on the bigger screen than my phone. 

I'll take this time to wish you all a 

filled with happiness, good health, harmony, and lots of stitching! Thanks for joining me for another year of stitchy goodness!

Take care and we'll see you next year! xoxo