100% back on my bulls***

 It's been about a week since my last post, and my crafting landscape has changed drastically since then.

After I finished my Stephen West Painting Bricks shawl:

I abandoned all of my knitting WIPs and reverted back to cross stitching.

You read that right, I'm back to endlessly stitching pokemon!  I'm not actually sure where I was when I last talked about this.  I may have mentioned that I've done the first panel of the third row (panel number 11).  I found my footing again, and really decided to run with it.

On this day, I went a little crazy with the black work.  Sometimes I like to do the framing stitches, and other times I don't.  It can make it easier to keep track and to count. It can also be a disaster if I lose count.  Fortunately that did not happen this time.

I think this was two days of work, instead of one.  I had a day where I could only stitch for a little while, and it didn't seem worth it to take a picture.

This was the end of last night's progress.  This is around the point that I realized how much faster I've been stitching since switching from the q-snap to the wooden frame.  I don't have to hold the frame with my hands, and it's rather bulky, so I'm finding it easier to keep my dominant hand underneath the fabric, pushing the needle through the correct holes while my left hand stays on top so I can see and better control what I'm doing. This way I can stitch with both hands, and it's saving a lot of time.

For example, that fire pony up there, I did all of the red, orange, various shades of black, yellow and tan all in less than an hour.  That's A LOT in a very short time period. (for cross stitching anyway) Especially with the color changing.

For smaller projects, I definitely prefer the q-snap, but for this, with all of the extra fabric, I needed to find a way to hold tension and contain the lot of it.  And, to be honest, it doesn't contain the fabric on it's own, so I fold and tape it using masking tape.  It's still much more manageable than the smaller q-snap frame.

Finally, today, I finished the last of that pony and page 12!

I spent a lot of time today working my way through page 13.

And there's a little bit of today left, I'll probably finish Onyx' eyes and do a little filling in around the guy to his right, Drowsy I think his name was? Yeah, the whole memorizing the pokemon has become completely impossible.  I do like asking Hazel what the names are before I stitch the page, but by the end of it I don't remember them.  ooops.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to finishing this row because at that point I'll be over halfway done!  The telltale halfway arrow is about an inch up the bottom of the pattern pages on these rows!

If you're curious about how I'm managing to read the pattern while both my hands are busy, I've taped it to my ott light!  I've got a whole operation going. I should ask Zac to get some video.  It's fascinating.  (to me!) haha.

 Speaking of video, I did take a video of my spinning during the TDF this year!  I meant to share it with you guys, but forgot.  oops.

But now I remembered, so hooray!

I hope you enjoyed that!  Someone said they couldn't watch it for some reason, Here is a link to my IG post of the same video.

And one more thing, I did get through the first section of foxes in Toby's sweater last weekend:

You'll notice the lack of eyes and noses. I'm going to duplicate stitch them sometime between finishing knitting the foxes and before I split for the sleeves.

Anyway, I hope you have a nice relaxing weekend!  Thanks for reading!