Three more check-ins

Well, I was caught up with my SAL check-ins for a couple of minutes days! Three more check-ins to catch-up with today, one on Saturday and I will be caught up for a while. I am starting to feel more settled at work which is, I hope, a sign that I will be more settled here at home.

So first up is  or Designers Everyone Should Instantly Get to Notice. It is hosted over at NCC. I have been very remiss posting to this SAL, but this month will recognize an "oldie but goodie" Just Nan.  According to their website, Just Nan started as a company in 1991 and I have been collecting and stitching her designs since right about that time. I have enough patterns and kits in my stash to almost be embarrassed as she was a must-buy for years.  My latest piece is Spring in the Air

Leonore gave us a list of questions to guide us for each post so...
-Have you stitched a piece by this designer before?  Oh yes. I have 20 or so pieces, mostly smalls and class projects hanging in my den/stitching room and I did five of her Christmas stockings for gifts one year. I also have a number of unfinished-finished pieces just waiting for me to get into a finishing mindset.
-Would you buy/stitch a piece by this designer again? Yes, although I did lose the "love" when she moved away from her sampler style, I have enough in my stash to keep me stitching her designs for a number of years.
-What made you chose this particular design/designer? Nan has a very distinctive style and color palette. I can still look at a stitched piece and pick her pieces out. For this particular piece? I love pansies and I am a sucker for seasonal series pieces. Unfortunately, I am not sure I will finish this series. I purchased this pattern and Strawberry Summer but when Winter Blues came out, I didn't like it. Nothing against the series, design or designer, it just did nothing for me.
-Did you notice anything that distinguished this designer from others? As I mentioned, she had a color palette that appealed to me and she was using unique, for me at the time, threads - perle cottons and silks.

From DESIGN to the HAP SAL.  The 2015 HAP SAL is hosted by Stacy at Crossed Stitches and highlights all those huge projects, defined by Stacy as "the smallest of the dimension of the stitch count is 300", you are stitching or want to stitch and maybe even finish in 2015.  My HAP for 2015 and the next 10 or 15 years is Shakespearean Fantasy. When I showed it to you last week, it was here:

Sunday evening, I put an additional 400 (gridding is good for stitch counting) black stitches in and it now looks like this:

In addition to my HAP SAL piece, Shakespearean Fantasy is one of my  pieces.  WIPocalypse is hosted by Melissa at Measi's Musing and is another SAL to help us focus on getting through our WIP pile.  I think between last weekend's post and the pictures above, I have posted updates of all my WIPocalypse pieces. There is a complete list in the WIPocalypse and YOTA Project List and 2015 Stitching Plan tab up top there. Melissa also gives us questions for each month's post. This month's is Fantasy or Reality? Which do you prefer to stitch? Figures or abstracts? I lean more towards reality or at least someone's concept of reality!  The presentation may be abstract, the theme is usually based in reality.  It isn't that I don't like fantasy pieces and I have stitched a fair number of them, but it it more a function of my stashing habits or lack thereof. When the majority of my stash was purchased, there weren't a lot of really good patterns that I would define as fantasy.  There has been an explosion of designers in that area over the last ten years or so, but I haven't been buying a lot of stash in that time.  With unlimited financial resources, my stash would look much different today.

As WIPocalypse and YOTA have the same goals and pieces, I am counting this as my YOTA post and am now AHEAD!!! with my SAL posts. I am sure I will get behind again soon enough so I won't rest on my laurels for too long.