School of Magical Stitching Homework Week 3

Today for my "homework" I've been working on Small Cuppa, an easy-peasy no brainer project, which is great, because I'm tired. 

Previously to today, I was working on Magical World by Tilton Crafts. It doesn't look like much but there are about 15 different colors in those 400 stitches. It takes a lot of concentration to work on a full coverage like that.

All told, I managed just over 800 stitches this week. I'm actually considering starting an excel file and making a graph, because, Nerd.

I'm so exhausted thanks to a pesty little critter who decided that 5 am (i.e. about 3.5 hours after I fell asleep) was a great time to get up and stay up. Where he gets the energy I have no idea. I'm considering installing a extra large hamster wheel on the side of the house and connecting it to a generator. We could probably go off-grid.

Its not yet 11 pm and I'm heading to bed in a few minutes. Luckily, Jack has the day off tomorrow so I'll have all hands on deck chasing down the Smidget.

Week 1 and 2 Homework Complete

I'm really loving this Harry Potter Stitch along that a couple hardworking ladies have set up and are maintaining. If you're interested in joining, the Facebook group is School of Magical Stitches and Literature. You can ask to join, fill out the form to get sorted into a house, and then start working on the "homework." There are weekly challenges that must be completed that week and monthly and yearly challenges for both reading and stitching.

Week one just required approximately 300 stitches, which I did on Small Cuppa that I shared last week.

Week 2 Homework required about 310 stitches in each of my two house colors - I'm was sorted into Slytherin for this year so I did half grey and half green. (But I do have to say that I consider myself to be Ravenclaw. They needed to keep the houses balanced so some of us volunteered to take one for the team).

I'm actually kind of excited. I feel like I've already done more stitching this month than I did in ALL of 2018. One of the most fun parts is finding projects that I already have going and making them fit the challenge requirements. For example, I had to figure out which project had enough green to get me rolling.

This SAL has been kind of bad for my wishlist as people keep sharing their uber-cool HP patterns. However, I have been good thus far on keep my stitch-from-stash commitment. Etsy is apparently a treasure trove of Harry Potter related stitchy goodness.

As always, please feel free to share a link to your blog or instragram in the comments and I'll be happy to pop in a have a look-see :)

SmallPDF

Found the last two! Woodland Enchantress by Dimensions and Imagination Unleashed by Charting Creations

Alright well you may have noticed that my HAED and other full coverage BAPs aren't getting a lot of love. Most are at less than half a page completion. This is because I was running into a problem with the PDFs.

I use ezPDF on my tablet to search for and highlight the symbols I'm stitching. After I stitch it, I mark it off. On a page with 8,000 stitches, this results in quite a few highlights and I was discovering that about the time I got halfway through a page, the program would crash due to all the little individual bits of data that resulted from the hundreds of highlights. Often I would lose all my progress. It got to be very frustrating.

The solution has been discovered in making a working copy by using a program to extract just the page I'm working on and loading that single page to my tablet, and then flattening the highlights in ezPDF as I go. I combed through my Facebook Groups for the software that could extract pages from PDFs and found that someone recommended SmallPdf.com. I tested it out and it works beautifully. The best part is that its free if you use it through their website. If you want to install in on your computer they charge $6 a month subscription but for the rare occasions when I need it, I'll just use it on the website. I bring all this up because if you are currently stitching from PDFs and are running into the same problem, this may help.

I'm currently working on Small Cuppa and I have about a hundred more stitches to do on it before I complete my current stitching challenge (I joined a group that is spending 2019 reading the Harry Potter series and stitching as they go) and then I'll swap it out for Waiting by Tilton Crafts and see if my new system works as well as I suspect.

Happy Stitching all!

I'm back? Maybe?

I recently made an assessment of my WIP status just for cross stitch. There are two missing that I have not located yet, Imagination Unleashed and Woodland Enchantress. I really am hoping to be able to take a few minutes every day to work on one of these. I really think I could make a serious dent in this list with half and hour a day of Me Time.The oldest of these is either the Timberwolves project or the Castle but they were both started so long ago that I honestly can't remember.

We're still running into chronic sleep problems with the Smidget and I absolutely MUST put some dedicated time into launching my work from home career. It just seems that everything is stacked against me - when I resolve to set aside time daily for it, Smidget gets sick or is up for three hours in the middle of the night, or I find myself fighting with the student loan companies or putting out some other sort of fire. I've been so exhausted that I haven't been able to even find the time to write simple blog posts in the past few months. Believe me when I say I have spent countless hours searching for and trying every solution available. It is impossible for me to convey what kind of mental and physical haze I've been wading through in the last 15 months under the duress of severe sleep deprivation. I do hope that now that things are starting to improve a bit that I'll be able to post more regularly. I would like to make a similar assessment of all my crochet, quilt, and sewing projects as well. This is a task I have been avoiding for several years, assuming that it is better not to know, but I'm really feeling that I'd love to complete some of these crafty endeavors that I have put so much time into already.

My New Year's Resolution is simple - to manage my time better. I have a short list of habits I want to create, one of which is taking a little crafty time every evening (I'm one for three so far lol), getting just a few minutes of exercise daily, reading my Bible daily (three for three!), spending much much less time on social media, things like that.

Please feel welcome to share your blog link in the comments, I'm always thrilled to pop in and see what other people have going on.