Good Bye 2017

2017 was a year of big occasions in my family.  The year started with a surgery (my gallbladder removal) and ended with one (The Hubs had his rotator cuff repaired on Thursday).  In between, my parents celebrated their 59th wedding anniversary, DSon moved from Vermont to Michigan and started a new job, DNephew and DNiece were both married, DSis and DBIL celebrated their 30th wedding anniversary and The Hubs' niece announced her engagement.  Phew! I'm ready for a bit of a rest.

As it's the end of December as well as the end of the year, it's time for the final  check-in for 2017.  WIPocalypse is hosted by Melissa at Measi's Musings and is a personal challenge, not a contest, to stay on goal and finish some of those WIPs that most of us have hanging around.  She gives us topics each month for discussion and December's is to recap what we've done through the year.  This is going to be long and picture heavy.  

So for 2017....  I had the same number of finishes, 12, that I had last year.  You can see all my finishes in the tab labeled "Finishes" but I am going to show them here too.  You can see all my small finishes in my last post those I'm not going to reshow.

So first up was wedding samplers. I finished To Have and To Hold Bridal Sampler and Sentimental Hearts both by The Sweetheart Tree.  There are changes made to both samplers - mostly color changes on To Have and To Hold  but a little bit of chart reworking as the names were a bit longer than would fit.  A verse and names were added to Sentimental Hearts.



To Have and To Hold

Sentimental Hearts



After the wedding samplers, I moved onto a Christmas stocking, A Glimpse of Santa from Stoney Creek:

And around those finishes, I also had Winter Wonderland from The Silver Needle which was my first finish of the year and Snowgirls from Country Garden Stitchery:

Winter Wonderland

Snowgirls

I had progress on my Heaven and Earth Design projects.

Shakespearean Fantasy

January 1, 2017

December 31, 2017

Santa and the Mouse

January 1, 2017

December 31, 2017

and It's About Time

January 1, 2017

December 31, 2017

The Enchantment of Winter was a new start:

And Santa's Magic made an unexpected appearance in December.

January 1, 2017

December 31, 2017

I finished his beard with about 5" of Wisper thread left - if anybody is keeping track it will take more than two cards of Wisper White to finish this piece.  Rather than put in another order for a thread that I didn't really like stitching with, I made an executive decision that any other areas that were charted for Wisper would be done in plain old DMC white.  If I were to do it again, I would probably use B5200 for the charted white and white for the charted Wisper.  I think that would give just enough shade difference to keep it from looking flat.  I got my order of Kreinik in today's mail, but I won't be pulling this one out until I finish my two obligation pieces.

After putting Santa away, I pulled out Japanese Zen Garden.  Yes, it's a little early to start my 2018 rotation, but it kept calling.  It went from here:

To here:

I needed the green border to hold those gold swirls in place.  As they are off center I kept thinking I was off on my count.  Now that everything is neatly contained it is going much better.  I had planned to work on this all day today, but my phone's battery has been acting up (not holding a charge, heating up while charging, etc.) and today was the first appointment I could get.  Word of advice - do NOT go to an Apple store at anytime around Christmas - it was mobbed.  Between the waiting and the fixing and the grocery store my afternoon was shot. I am not planning on going anywhere tomorrow so there should be more swirly bits by tomorrow night.

So those are my finishes and progress for 2017.  I will be participating in WIPocalypse in 2018 and will be back in a week or so to post my goals and hopefully show some progress on Zen and Goldie.