the catch-up game: monthly goals

yours truly has been reunited with her dear chap yesterday, free of charge. let’s all rejoice for a moment and thank the cosmos for this series of fortunate events. 🙂 thank you too for crossing your fingers so hard for me and bringing me such good luck, it was so very appreciated! 😀 😘

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now let’s list my goals for May with a recap on how it went and add more fuel to the fire for June [I’m adding pictures to the written part below rather than the list this time]:

• stitch Once Upon A Time by The Frosted Pumpkin Stitchery block 4 Goldilocks and 5 Jack and the Beanstalk and pretend I’m all caught up one year later. –> NO 🔘 😦 but I put this on June’s list and I’m determined to get it crossed out.
• stitch the 3rd, 4th and 5th part of Story Time Sampler by The Frosted Pumpkin Stitchery (Sherlock Holmes, The Wizard of Oz and Charlotte’s Web) –> YES!! ☑️ 😀 I also managed to finish stitching all the frames, fix the monster slug, chart a small banner at the bottom and stitch that one too! 🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉
• there were 14 more points on the list that I didn’t get to touch so I won’t even bother repeating them, but other things jumped on my stitching frame or got done, more on this in a bit.

monthly goals for June:

• stitch the 6th part of Story Time Sampler by The Frosted Pumpkin Stitchery (Peter Pan) —> ☑️ YES!! 😀 had I been able to post my monthly goals last week I would have crossed this one out at the end of the month, but since the laptop visited the 🍎🏥 😀 (Apple Hospital) for a week, I’m putting it in and crossing it out at the same time 😉
• resume working on Christmas Celebration Sampler by The Frosted Pumpkin Stitchery and finish it (I left it on the letter T).
• stitch Once Upon A Time by The Frosted Pumpkin Stitchery block 4 Goldilocks, 5 Jack and the Beanstalk and 6 Princess and the Pea and pretend I’m all caught up one year later.
• work on Chubby Taras and get as much of the flowers done to allow me to work all the backstitching on the cat.
• stitch & finish a couple of gifts (no further mention of these until they reach their new home).
• should I feel the need to have a quick new start, get my fix by picking one of the itsy bitsy smalls in my wicker basket (the ones I didn’t even bother to mention in my May’s goals).

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all in all May has been quite a dense month. I managed to:

1. get all caught up on Story Time 😀
2. fix that nasty supermassive slug hole (Muse reference here)
3. organise my extra threads stash (solid ones, there’ll be a specific post on this topic later this month)
4. do some major stash/space cleaning up which stole most of my stitching hours, so I can’t complain on the lack of reasonable progress on certain goals.. it was long overdue and now I have such a nice, much more practical stitching/studying environment, I feel almost reborn. OCD people will understand.

anyways, I made a couple of changes on my OZ frame before working on Peter Pan, and Peter itself, although finished, will get a minor quick fix as soon as I put it back on the dowels, so no good snap update on that just yet.

in this snap is proof I’ve actually worked on this one (such an adorably kawaii frame! – which is what I say of every frame every month, to be honest 😀 ) + I also gathered up some of my childhood memories on the boy that never grew up.

apart from the stitching, you can spot my old Disney VHS tape and the DVD I bought a couple of years ago – this one I chose to get also in Italian because that version is very good, as well as the original I’ll say. a couple of fun facts on this topic:

• Captain Hook in Italian is, literally, Capitano Uncino
• Tinkerbell is Trilli
• and Mr. Smee is Spugna (sponge)

if you happen to know even a bit of Italian, I strongly recommend to watch this one should you ever get the chance to. 🙂

going back deep, deep into my childhood memories are the C’era una volta (Once upon a time) issues collection + audiocassette featuring Peter’s adventures. I adored Francis Phillips‘ drawings and, of course, Paolo Poli‘s voice telling this story.

if you were born in the ’80s or had kids in those glorious days, you might already be familiar with the awesomeness of those publications; if you missed Marshall Cavendish’s Story Teller/Story Time I strongly recommend you investigate them starting here, with their Wikipedia page.

moving onto my second goal for this month, I’m already on it: here’s where I had left my Christmas Celebration Sampler back in December 2014, with the letters T M A S and the outer lace border to finish:

it took me a bit to figure out my colour palette for this one (when I took it off the frame I didn’t imagine I would wait 6 solid months before picking it up again); MEMO TO ME: always write everything down before taking a project off the frame. 😬

now this project needs to get done for multiple reasons, one of them being the fact that Amanda and Ashleigh just announced a new Club along the lines of their Mysterious Hallowe’en Town, only Christmas themed. no further news on this at the moment apart from the recent post on their official Instagram account (@thefrostedpumpkinstitchery). 😀

I don’t think I posted an update on Chubby Taras in a while here, so there you go, a slideshow in WordPress style: 🙂

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in these next two shots you have a bit of a look at my lost & found stitching spot, as well as a glimpse at those two DMC skeins I needed to stitch this cutie pie:

these shots are a tad outdated, really. I finished all the stitching on the cat (filled in the white in his belly and worked all his fluffy tail), a bit of green for the flower stems but no backstitching apart from those traits you can see, merely so that he would stop looking oddly faceless.

the backstitch on this piece is the only almost hard work it requires, in the sense that you have to pay careful attention to where you come up & go down (unless you want to take the shortcuts their model stitcher took, and you know I’m no fan of shortcuts when it comes to intricate backstitching). 😀

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more news on what I’ve been up to will come out in the next posts, I have them all scribbled down the old-fashioned way on my notebook, so see you soon! 🙂

will I ever win the catch-up game? I don’t reckon such a thing can even be possible, but you know me, I’m always willing to try! 😀 ciao!

chiara

P.S. a few updates on Taras, Pablita and the garden.. summer’s in full swing here! 😀 🌼☀️

can we play with the water already?!

leave the tablecloth unattended on the table long enough and it turns into a cat beddy, just like that! 😀

chat perché on the Cherry Tree

oi! who put tiny red balls on the tree?! 🍒

gelato fuelling my stitching on Peter. remember I made a boo boo on that row of frames in the middle? they’re all two stitches higher than they should be, which means I have to slightly add/move things here and there.. and when did this happen? when I completely lost access to my laptop AND printer, so I had to go old-school and use pastels and graph paper! 😬

Chiara! I’m going on an adventure!! a very unstable one too!!

all this heat makes Taras so sleepy in the morning, I get up way earlier than him!

Pablita had her vet check-up yesterday and her condition has finally showed signs of improvement: not as red as she looked here, a week ago. also, doesn’t she look a bit like a ballerina in a shell here? 😂🐢 (I’m not taking these shots because I feel like: we have to monitor the redness as that’s the sign of infection, which you can see was pretty nasty 7 days ago).

et dulcis in fundo, my very first blossom this year: an itsy bitsy Star of the Veld!!

and cherries!! 🎉🍒