This Week In WIPs.

I thought it would be fun to show the projects I've worked on this week.  So, in no particular order...

First up, a ginormous cross stitch of a mama tiger and a few cubs.  Ultimately it will by 10" by 28" and look like this:

You can see I've got a long way to go.  I didn't do all that this week, either.  I started this thing way back maybe even in college, and I usually work on it for a few weeks, get fed up with it and shove it away somewhere for a few years before going at it again.  It's been excruciately slow.  I hope it speeds up a bit once I'm not having to sort through floss and add several new colors a row, but I think it's always going to be slow.

This time around I'm using the parking method.  I was so excited when I found out about this method.  "Oh wow, you mean the cross stitch police won't come after me if I do this?!  Yay!"  When I was taught to cross stitch, that way was verboten, but it's very logical to me.  I think it's come about because computer use in cross stitch design has resulted in a large number of modern patterns that are beautiful, but not what I would call well-designed.  I'll go into what I consider a well-designed pattern in a later entry.  For now, though, this one is not terribly well designed IMHO.

Also cross-stitching is this little kimono card.

Also started long ago and picked up again.  This little guy is living in my bed to work on while waiting for appointments and what not.  Since I have a kimono hanging on my wall, I am regularly laughing my ass off at how completely not accurate that silouhette is.  But at the same time, the actually outline of a kimono hanging with the side panels spread wouldn't translate well to cross stitch, so I can maybe forgive it.  Although they could have been a little less extreme in the wrongness.

Also worked on a piece of crazy quilting:

I need to put the cross stitch down and work on this a bit more.  The size of the tracing paper transfer isn't much smaller than the hoop, so I can't really take the hoop off between stitching.  I don't want to leave it on indefinitely, though, because it can distort the fabric.

This is part of a piece that's going to be made into a duffle bag.  The white basting you can see is lining out approximate cutting lines and where the straps will be.  This are blocks that were originally intended for a coverlet back before I had a queen-sized bed, and now I'm trying to use them in other ways.  Another week maybe I'll think to lay it out on the floor and take a picture of the whole thing.

And of course, there is the infamous Spiderman blanket:

Growth functions suck.  You can see I'm really far along on this.  I only have to do two more wide stripes, one in blue and one in red.  The problem?  Thanks to the growth function, on a stitch-count basis this is only about halfway done.  I still have 46% of this bastard to finish. :P
It's TV and social knitting.  Luckily it's a super-simple pattern; I hardly have to look at it.