Home Sweet Home Yoshi WIP 030 & 031

Well, first of all, happy Tuesday and I apologize for the delay in posting. My laptop decided to throw a temper tantrum on Sunday night and I was without a computer to post from until yesterday afternoon when it decided to fix itself out of nowhere. Luckily, Lappy lives to see another day, but not without some melodrama first. (Edit: it's still acting up, but luckily I have a work around for now.)

True to form, I forgot to take a picture between WIP 030 and 031, so this is a double post, but I'm almost caught up in terms of WIP photos for July, so these posts shouldn't be so backlogged in the near future. Also, before I forget to mention this, please excuse me for taking such blurry photos of my work through July 7 & 8. Apparently I am an incredible lightweight when it comes to drinking. I can sew in stitches like a mad woman, but ask me to take a photograph after I've had two beers and this is what you're going to get.

Overall, I have to say that my profession and my hobbies go well together. I get to spend quality time with my clients' animals and practice productive hobbies that benefit others and bring happiness to my life. I feel very lucky to have such a symbiotic work life, not many people get to have that in their lives.

Total Stitches through July 8, 2014: 4,534/21,600 (20.99%)
Total Time through July 8, 2014: 1 day 13 hours 28 minutes

Home Sweet Home Yoshi WIP 029

Without further ado, I present to you Work In Progress 029!

For some reason, holidays tend to be really great crafting days for me and this year was no different. The only thing that was out of the ordinary was the fact that I spent this 4th of July at a client's house while they were traveling to Boston. I didn't cross stitch a whole lot on this day, but I did get just under an hour of work done throughout the day with my sidekick Honey Bear to keep me company.

It was interesting cross stitching with a dog curled up with me on the couch. My dogs don't typically curl up with me while I work and if they do, then it's usually Baby, our Chihuhua-Poodle mix, so having HB, a boxer-pit mix curling up on my feet was really interesting. (It was warm, too! So nice.)

This might have been one of my most quiet Fourth of July holidays, but it was really nice to enjoy the company of Honey Bear over the course of the day while we watched a Dirty Jobs marathon on Animal Planet. After July 4, 2014, I have invested 1 day 9 hours 38 minutes into this project and have sewn in 18.50% of this project--3,995/21,600 stitches. Almost one-fifth of the way there!

Home Sweet Home Yoshi WIP 028

Happy Wednesday! I know that I've been slipping a bit behind in terms of WIP dates recently, but I promise that I should be caught up, or close to caught up within the next week or two.

WIP 028 was worked on July 3rd, mostly in TJ's truck while we were stuck in traffic for two hours trying to get to the San Diego County Fair for a Tubes concert. Let me tell you from new found some personal experience that cross stitching in the car--especially in rush hour traffic--is a fantastic way to kill some time.

As you can tell, I was able to do a lot while we sat in those two hours of bumper-to-bumper traffic. I'm almost complete done stitching an entire column top to bottom and a lot of the remaining blank space will be solid blocks of color to sew in. I'm hoping to have the next tree trunk done by the end of July along with the next "window" of background. As always, though, I'm not sure if that will happen. I'm just excited to be getting more and more done. And let me tell you, I cannot wait to be done stitching in this khaki color once and for all!

Oh, and in honor of The Tubes, since this stitching was all done on the way to one of their concerts, I present you the original music video of my favorite song by them. Enjoy.

Home Sweet Home Yoshi WIP 026 & 027

So, I did a bad thing and forgot to take a take a picture between WIP 026 and WIP 027. The good news is that it's really easy to distinguish between days. On June 30th, the day of WIP 026, I finished the left-side tree trunk's outline and filled in the entire background area between there and the chimney. I also did about one-third of the new section of khaki stitches on that day, maybe five or six rows worth, but I forgot to take a picture after everything was said and done, so OOPS!

Total Stitches Through 6/30: 3,359/21,600 (15.55%)
Total Time Through 6/30: 1d 5h 19m

Most of the work done for WIP 027 was done over at SO's house after going to the bowling alley with Charlotte, SO, and a few other friends earlier in the day. I am a terrible bowler, but it was fun to spend time with everyone before Charlotte left town for good.

I didn't get a whole bunch done in terms of appearances, but I did add 240 stitches in, which is nothing to shake a stick at. Anything over 1% in a day is great news for me. I wonder if I can keep this progress up if I can get Yoshi done by the end of summer. Somehow I doubt it, but maybe by New Year's?

Total Stitches Through 7/1: 3,599/21,600 (16.66%)
Total Time Through 7/1: 1d 7h 9m

Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Batman! (Tutu)

Most of my readers don't know that I'm a double agent who not only maintains Bob Crochets Craft Down, but also a second blog called #RunTylerRun. There I keep track of my running races and training. Rarely do the two subjects mix, but sometimes my crafting and running can become one and the same topic.

Since May 2013 I have run five half marathons, two of which have been the Costume Party Half Marathon*. For the 2013 race, I was still new to the whole idea of running, so I decided not to dress up. It was too intimidating to me, but for 2014 I knew what expect and I was ready. Three of us were running: Claudia, my mom TJ, and me.

A few weeks prior to our race, Claudia found superhero technical tees at her local Target and texted me saying that she'd purchased our race shirts for us. I was going to be Batman, Claudia was going to be Superman, and my mom was going to be Spiderman, because it was that or nothing. TJ was too petite for anything but a men's small, so shopping for her was...difficult.

We made it happen, though, and as soon as the shirts were purchased, I began work on the rest of my costume for the race. All it took was a trip on Wednesday to Old Navy to buy the pants I wanted and a second stop to JoAnn's for tutu material and I was off.

This is what my poor client's dining room table looked like for three days. I'm sure it looks clean, but as soon as tulle strips started to pile up, it became a total mess. In all, I think I used about twelve yards of tulle, but if I had been feeling really determined, I know that I could have used up all fifteen yards that I had purchased.

I alternated cutting and tying tulle as much as possible since both have a tendency to be tedious. In total the project took me three days and a boatload of Netflix episodes to get, through, but I ended up very happy with the fruits of my labor.

End of Work Day #1

 I have to admit that the photograph from Night #1 don't seem to show a lot of progress, but off camera there were a lot of piled up tulle strips ready to go for the next day. I also try and make my tutus as stretched out as possible, with just a little bit of overall give to them, so even though I cut a strip of elastic that was about eighteen inches long, by the end of the first night My elastic had already become about twenty to twenty-two inches in circumference.

End of Work Day #2, Front View

End of Work Day #2, Top View

At the end of Day #2 I had gotten to the point where I was headed around the back of the chair, a huge feat in any tulle tutu making process. From the top down, it doesn't look like much, but from the front, this Bat-tutu was starting to come together. I figured that if I got all the rest of my cutting done on Night #2, that I could spend my last day of work, Friday, just knotting on tulle.

And that's what I did. My Batman tutu was done after roughly 3:00 in the afternoon on Friday, a healthy two and a half days before CPR. Here's my horrible mirror picture that I sent to TJ and Claudia that afternoon.

 

And even better, here's our picture from race day!

See you all with a new post soon!

* For more information regarding CPR 2014, please click here.

Home Sweet Home WIP 025

Well, after a three month hiatus,* I gave in and went back to working in some color on this piece as of June 29. I think that between all the black outlining and going-ons of May and June, I was just ready for a bit of change, so I decided to move on and start doing some of the larger, easy color blocking on this piece. Eighty stitches is by no means a lot for a day's work, but I'm just glad to be working on Yoshi again as summer comes into full swing. Total time logged is at 1 day 1 hour 39 minutes with 2,847/21,600 stitches complete (13.18%).

* See Charlotte's Going Away Scrapbook for more information regarding the insanity of the last few months.

Home Sweet Home Yoshi WIP 023 & 024

All right, prepare for the stupid joke. Prepared? LUCY! I'm home! The outline for both the chimney and the word HOME are completely done and ready for color. I don't know how much color I'll be adding in the next few weeks, or if I'll do some color and go back to outlining, but for now I'm just excited to have 1/3 of the wording done for this project. I'm really looking forward to doing some of the fills on this piece.

Total Stitches:  2,767/21,600 (12.81%)
Total Time: 1d 0h 52m