POKEMON 2: THE POKEMONING

 It's only been about a week since I last posted, but boy howdy, do I have news!

Well, I'll start from the beginning.  Two or three weeks ago, Zac ordered ceiling fans for the living room, office and bedrooms.  We spent the next week installing them.  It wasn't too difficult, the wiring in the house is brand new, and it was just a matter of getting them up there.  I helped, naturally, and it was a very productive week.

Hazel's room was the penultimate one.  I sat on her carpet putting rubber grommets in the fan blades for attaching the metal bits while Zac was doing the wiring and installing the fan base.  I was admiring the pokemon, you know the first generation I stitched in 2021? Such an enormous amount of stitching, over 115 thousand little exes.  And so much fun to watch all the little monsters take shape.

And then... I felt that familiar pull.  The one that makes me do nutty things like stitching entire pokemon generations.  When I first started the first one, I asked Hazel which was her favorite generation of pokemon, and she said 5th and I felt a pang then.  But now, I've decided, I'm doing it!  Fifth generation, here we go!

IT'S HAPPENING.

For this one, I ordered a large enough piece of fabric that I've decided to do the extended edition-- the one where you can see the edges of all the monsters.  It's only a few more inches around, but with math I discovered it's an increase of 50 thousand stitches! WILD.

Anyway, the background isn't just 'blue' this time, it's brick.  Which is rather more interesting than 'blue' but rather less interesting than pokemon.

You can see the first few days' progress:

The keen observer will notice that the bottom picture has fewer black mortar stitches at the bottom.  Yeah, the pattern designer fucked up.  I was under the assumption that the bricks were a filled in thing, select space, fill in with this pattern.  It wasn't done that way.  There's a jog about halfway down this page, and not only are the bricks shifted one stitch to the right, some of the inner bricks are only 6 wide instead of 7.  -_- 

Really, in spite of that, it is enjoyable.  The first monster is just barely sort of beginning to take shape now.  It's Keldios.  As little as I knew about gen. 1 pokemon, I know even less about this one.  I can't imagine I'll be remembering any of these when I'm done, but that's cool.  Hazel knows them all.

Other than cross stitch, I did finish a few things in the past week.

This is the chain plied merino bamboo I was spinning on my e-spinner.  Here it's unwashed, but I've since washed it.  I still need to count yardage, but it looks pretty good.  I'm happy with it.  I don't have any plans at all to stitch with it, but that's cool.

Lastly, we painted Toby's room, and therefore the Yoshis I stitched last year needed to get in a frame and on her wall!

Huzzah!

(you can see they aren't on her wall yet in this picture, but have been hung since then)

Special bonus!

I bought a new plant!

I got it while we were waiting for the paint at Lowe's.  It's a columbine and it is gorgeous.

In reading news, very little reading news.  I did read two of the Dark Elf books from that omnibus.  And then I read the fifth Invisible Library book.  In a very weird pique, I rediscovered Koontz, and am slowly working my way through Watchers, my very first grown up book I ever read in my life.  But I'm not reading for hours and hours anymore, now I'm cross stitching.  So reading will be slow for awhile.  No worries.

I hope I'll have lots more pokemon to share next time.  Stay tuned!