My 2023 Wrap Up

Welcome to my blog and thank you for taking the time to stop by and check it out. Here you will find posts mainly about my cross stitching but occasionally I may switch it up a bit and show progress on a knit or crochet project if the mood strikes. So to begin, I thought the best thing to start off with was a 2023 Wrap up post since we are now mid-December.

2023 was a good year for progress, considering I was pregnant for half of it and a new mum for the rest of the year, and the stitching success was largely due to the support and encouragement from my friends Sabea and Sarah. You can check out Sarah’s blog at Marneys Mixed bag and we are still trying to encourage Sabea to jump on the blogging bandwagon 😉.

In 2023 we imposed a set of rules for ourselves to help minimise the effects of Startitis and see more stitches in our current works in progress. The main thing was that we allowed ourselves only 5 starts for the year, 1 per quarter plus a birthday start. The new starts had to be used in the allotted quarter and couldn’t be rolled over. Any more new starts after that had to be earned by completing projects.

To encourage progress we used several Facebook groups to maintain stitching progress:

I Dare You SAL
WIPgo
Magical Stitches
Myth & Magic Wars

In addition to that we also used the Tiny Decisions wheel to create a WIP Wheel if we needed more WIPS to work on throughout the month (this was mostly used by Sabea - Hardcore Stitcher 😎)

We also predetermined a set amount of stitches for each WIP before moving on to the next one, mine was 500 stitches Sabea’s was 1500 stitches and Sarah rolled a dice to determine her stitch count.

Twice a year (June & December) we would have a Focus to Finish month where we would select WIPs that were closest to a finish and try to get it completed by the end of the month. I’m still working on Beneath the Harvest Moon to get a finish before the end of the year 🤞🏻

See below for current update picture.

I’m happy to report that this seemed to be working well for me and helped me get in a couple of finishes!! I’m thinking that I’ll will follow the same guidelines as we enter into 2024. However I have discovered a few new stitching groups and games on Facebook so who knows how I’m going to make it all work 😅

2023 Stitching

I started 2023 with 55 WIPS and managed to finish two projects so far, however I still found my pile intimidating so I abandoned a few WIPs and de-WIPped projects that had less than a 100 stitches and returned them to my stash. I now have 48 WIPs in total, aiming for another by end of December 2023

WIPs I Worked on:

Sally Squirrel by Geckorouge
Sam and Dean by Tilton Crafts
Beneath the Harvest Moon by Whispered by the Wind
Little Tiger Cub by Anchor
Alice in Wonderland by Bothy Threads
Into the Jungle by The Frosted Pumpkin Stitchery
Folk art Fox by Durene Jones

Completed Projects (2)

Rose Butterflies by LabPattern on Etsy (Started 19/03/2023 - Completed 20/04/2023)

A Ghostly Mandala by Ink Circles (Started 15/10/2022 - Completed 04/11/2023)

New Starts

Wednesday and Enid Christmas by Tilton Crafts (Started 08/01/2023)

This was my birthday start. Only managed 100 stitches of white background then put it away. Not sure if you can see it as it is white on ivory white. Does the white look dirty to you? I see discolouration in the thread and it is putting me off.
Little Panda by Anchor (Started 06/09/2023)

Started this for Sarah’s birthday but wasn’t able to do much as Baby Boy was commanding most of my time (I’m talking a tiny cluster of stitches so I could celebrate). Sarah has already told me that I can’t re stash this project 😂