On the Last Day of Christmas Vacation

...which was yesterday...

...I thought we could use a recap.

This Christmas vacation, I started three new projects, worked on two WIPs, spent a day with my favorite niece, a day with my in-laws, started learning some new-to-me technology, slept in, relaxed, ate too much junk food, cleaned up my sewing room (please note I didn't say it was clean, just that I had cleaned it up) and generally had a nice relaxing time that seemed to fly by far to quickly.

So how did my "December Plan" go? Here it is, as published on Dec 1.

1. My two main cross stitch projects this month will be: The Castle and Penguin Family. Results: Major progress on Penguin Family, minimal progress on The Castle. 

Before

Before

After

2. My two quilts I will work on this month are: Sunset Kona and Hugs and Kisses. Results: No work done on Hugs and Kisses (actually, I did piece the backing and purchase batting). Kona Sunset has about 60% of the top pieced. 

No Change

Before

After

3. I will plan on finishing the green hood and starting Jack's brown ranger hood. - No Change. Funny how the month just seems to get away from me,.

4. My lunchtime cross stitch projects at work will continue to be the Christmas ornaments. I don't know how many of these I will finish before Christmas, but I have eight done and four more in progress. I also need to get these made into ornaments. Results - Completed! (mostly). I finished 10 of my planned 16. The rest will have to wait until next year. All ornaments should have been delivered to their new homes by now.

Before

After

After

5. On a more personal note, my December "Get Healthy" goal is to get some exercise every day, even if only for fifteen or twenty minutes. I've always been wishy-washy about whether or not to post these non-crafty goals since its not really relevant to the blog topic but I think it will hold me a little more accountable. So far, so good. I was able to exercise today. Results - Nope. Totally didn't happen. Part of this is that my living room always has laundry all over it, so there isn't really anywhere to exercise. I'll have to address this in the future, but in the meantime, I did make an effort to drink more water every day and have been averaging a couple liters a day!

6. I want to finish a book I just started on the Roman Empire. It is called Ancient Rome: The Rise and Fall of an Empire by Simon Baker. This directly relates to my Nanowrimo idea for next November, and I have a lot of research to do before I can start plotting. I'd like to work on this a little bit every day. Once I finish the book, I will start drafting a plot outline. Results - Will not finish the book in time. It turned out to be a little drier than I had anticipated. On the flip side, I did start a new trilogy called "Merlin's Spiral." Excellent books, highly recommend them. I'm about a tenth of the way through the third book. 

Now onto the new stuff. I started A Light in the Dark. It mostly looks like a blob of brown now, but I'm only about 700 stitches in. There are seven different colors in that little blob of brown.

I started Affairs of the Heart. Here is block #2, completed thanks to Jack stuffing my stocking with beautiful variegated threads to do the embroidery. Where is block #1 you may ask? Well, I was a little intimidated by all the scroll work in block #1, so I tackled block #2 first. I also have some work done on block #5. 

I started World Travel Bookshelf as well. All twenty or so stitches!

I still have a couple days of December left, so I'll see how far I get before making my January Plan.