#weekly wips

[jwylea]

Y'all Im almost done with this piece and I cant wait to be done😭

I loved every minute of it cause it made me see my progress of all these months, but geez this has taken far too long man💀

[milesyart]

Weekly WIPs

So, I've started a thing where I'm working on about a million things at once.  I realised that I've got a huge stack of WIPs, and I'm making zero progress on any of them.  So instead of making zero progress across the board, let's make slow progress on many projects.  There are also a couple of new ones in here, either as restarts or just something I felt like doing.  So let's take a look at all of them.

 Dr Strange

This is one of my livestream projects.  I started it new as a way of getting away from the horses, which I'm forever going to be blah about, I think.  It's very boring right now, since all of the fun bits are nowhere near the corners, but that's kind of universal I think. I'm having one small problem with it, however.  I apparently have two work files for this.  And I appear to have printed off my example image from the wrong one.  They're the same image, but the colour-scattering is different.  On most pieces, I can look at my printed example, and the pixels will match the stitches, so I can see areas that are giving me grief.  This one doesn't do that.  I can get an idea of what colour goes in which area, but I can't tell which colour goes in which specific spot.  I could always reprint the image using the work file I printed the pattern off from, but toner is expensive, and I'd like to keep it.

Fenrir

Some of you might recognise this one.  It's from the very first stitchalong, years ago.  I think by now, everyone knows what happened: Windows 10 is a horrible piece of shit, and upgrading melted my hard drive.  I lost so many files, including the weeklies from this one.  I was able to recover the master, so I've finally printed that off to work on it.  It's... a challenge.  The trees in my one page finish so far are all sorts of fucked up, because keeping track of what's already been stitched on a totally unmarked pattern page isn't easy.  But I think I've come up with a good system. Ordinarily when I stitch, I sort of go from the top left corner of a grid square down to the bottom right.  That doesn't work.  I have to pick out the largest areas of colour and stitch those first, and then use those to fill in the fiddly details.  I've bought a box of purple highlighters, along with some new pink and blue ones, and probably won't pick this one up again until they get here.  I'd rather be able to mark up the page where there's already stitching, just to make life easier. This poor thing has been sitting around for so long, the gridding is a mess as well, which isn't helping.  It's had water spilled on it twice, as you can probably see, but I think the current page finish has covered up the area where there just straight up wasn't any gridding left.  It should get easier from here.

Foxy

This one was only supposed to take one day.  Ten hours in, and this is all the farther I've managed to get.  The black on black isn't helping, but I'm honestly not sure what about this one is taking so long.  I wanted a quick video I could film and get up by the end of the year, but with Christmas and my anniversary right around the corner, that's not going to happen.  I really want to try to do more speed stitches though.  I just need to get better at judging how long they'll take, apparently.

Lazy Leopard

This is another one that's going to take me a century to finish.  This little smudge represents an hour of work.  More than an hour.  It's a livestream project, and I thought it would be fun to do something on stream that required parking.  There's so little done from this that I don't even have anything to say, other than how I kind of regret it already.  I might work on this one on tonight's stream.  We'll see.

Spider-Man

This is one of those re-starts.  Way back when I first started my channel, I had the idea to do a livestream project, and this was it.  But I somehow managed to screw it up beyond repair, and I had to toss it out.  So now this is my Patreon project.  I only work on this one during Patreon streams, which is why it's so piddly.  It's not a difficult one to do though, so relatively infrequent streams will still get it finished in a decent amount of time.  I  just need to find a good time to do those streams.  The schedule I set up this month really did not work out, so I'm going to try something else starting next month.

Villainous

This is one that started off life as a livestream project, and then got shunted aside because I needed the stretcher bars for something else.  I feel like this one's going to destroy my supply of blue, and would have a good go at destroying my supply of black if not for the giant cone of that I have. I'm going to put it into a 7" hoop when it's done.  And I only have one 7" hoop, because they seem like they're impossible to find.  So I've been having to be very careful about not using it on something else.

Howling Wolves

This is another restart.  I'd started it years ago on this really funky fabric, and got maybe 100 stitches into it before realising the fabric was a bad fit.  It's now on 22ct, and going much better, as you can probably see.  It's a lot of black.  So much black.  And navy.  I'm going to try to find a cone of navy to bolster my supplies, because holy crap, it's going to be thousands of stitches of navy. I'm not sure how many WIPs will be in an average roundup post going forward.  I suppose it mostly depends on how much time I have to actually work on stuff.  We shall see. from Blogger http://ift.tt/2DFZMXJ via IFTTT

[jwylea]

Y'all thought I forgot huh.

I did not forget ladies and gentlemen, I know I may be inconsistent but I don't bait people😔💔

Alright but jokes apart, I am almost through with the piece. As soon as exam period is over guys, I will be dropping this bad boy on my page (Exams are killing me man😭)

Fortunately by next week Friday, it's all over.

Thank you guys so much again for your patience, I love you guys so very much😭💗

[milesyart]

Weekly WIPs and New Recording Setup

Archer

I've made a little more progress on this one.  Not much, but a little.  Mostly it's just blue, blue, and more blue at this point, and probably will be across the entire top row of pages.  There might be a boat with an explosion at this level, but I'm not sure?  I'm going to Portland on Sunday, and if I take a project with me, it will probably be this one, since I'll be able to get away with just taking a few colours of floss, instead of the whole damn thing.  And since this one is whole stitches, because it's so old, it goes more slowly than a lot of my WIPs.  But I've got several hours of train ride, and an overnight stay, so I can probably put a decent little dent in all this blue by the time I get home Monday night.

Orange Sunset

Another page finish on this one!  It's a lot of confetti right now, because of the tree, but after a mega 6-hour stream last night, a lot of progress was made.  The amount of brown in this one is starting to drive me a little insane though.  In this whole thing so far, there are about eight stitches of proper orange. After that it's all rust, brown, and red.  And black.  I've already decided that when I finish this row of pages, I'm going to drop down to page 8 instead of going to page 5, just so I can finally do some of those bright oranges and yellows for a while, and get away from all these drab, dull colours.

Spider-man

This one continues to be slow, because Patron streams continue to be sporadic and short.  And since I'm going out of town, one of them will disappear.  I'll add a new one at some point during the week to make up for it though, otherwise there won't be any Patron streams at all this week.  But this is another one that's just drab and dull colours right now, which is probably what makes it so slow to work on.  The colours on this section aren't interesting, and I haven't done anything bright yet to really keep my excitement about it up.  But the next page will start to get fun, if I can ever get there.

Death Star

This is the new start, and there isn't much to it yet.  The pattern will be going up on Patreon at some point today.  This is actually one I made ages ago, before I really understood how pattern making worked for something that wasn't full coverage.  A few people got this in a loot box several years ago, but the pattern only worked on white fabric.  When I realised that, I fixed it up, and dyed this fabric that you can't really see, because all the shimmer on it gets in the way.  This one's going to be a speed stitch, and probably a long one.  This is about an hour's worth of work, according to timestamps.  The problem is the lack of gridding, and the detailed design.  It makes it go slowly.  But it'll get there.  I'm going to estimate probably 100 hours will go into this one.

Fenrir

And last, here's Fenrir.  I thought, after how quickly I got through the first page, this one would be a breeze.  But here I am, still working on Hilde and Sif.  This page is nothing but confetti and I want to die.  I've kind of been favouring this one when I work off-camera, just because I'm so eager to get away from this page and into something easier.  I MIGHT be able to finish this page tonight, but I also thought that last night, up until I realised it was 2am, and then gave up.

New Recording Space

This is something I've been wanting to do for a very long time, and was finally able to do thanks to my Patreon supporters.  I spent several days taking stuff out of my room and rearranging everything so I could finally install these acoustic tiles I've been eyeballing ever since I first started my channel.  The tiles are ultra-budget, so they're not cut exactly square, but it's the sort of thing you probably don't notice unless you're looking at it real close up.  But this setup finally gives me three-point lighting for my stitch recording, and I have enough distance between me and the lights that it doesn't fuck up my shot when I use the lights during a livestream.  Ideally, I'd have the lights up higher, but I don't have the means for that just now.  It'll be a slow process to get everything perfectly perfect, but for now, this is pretty darn good.  I brought Fred in, and draped him with some Halloween lights, and gave him some company in the form of some of my other YouTuber merch, and some random plushies we had sitting around the house. But I love this.  It makes my videos and streams look and sound so much nicer, and since the background is nice and vibrant, I've been experimenting with the way I do my thumbnails.  Unfortunately, my webcam is not the best, so the thumbnails are a bit low-res, but I'm not sure if that matters too much, since you'll rarely see them full-sized anyway.

from Blogger http://ift.tt/2Dai4Ec via IFTTT

[milesyart]

Weekly WIPs

Black Raven

I started this one on stretcher bars, which was a mistake for so many reasons: chief amongst them, stretcher bars don't come big enough (for reasons I soon found out), so I had to put it on a cannibalised picture frame instead.  It meant that I  had to find a frame that would work first, and then cut the fabric to size after, so the margins are a good 7-8".  The end result is that my shoulder exploded, so I tore this off the frame, threw it into a bucket, and forgot about it. Now that I'm working on it again, I'm annoyed that I started in the middle.  So I finished the bit that I'd been working on, and moved up to the corner instead, where it's easier to keep track of what page I'm supposed to be going to next.  This one is about 50% black, I think, and between it and the wolves, I may actually put a dent in my cone.  The good part about this one is there are so few colours that it does go quickly.  I like that.

Orange Sunset

This picture is really wonky and doesn't do the colour justice.  But this is what I've been focusing most of my livestream time on this week.  I really want to get it done, because it does go quickly, and it's been sitting around forever not getting worked on. The orange is bothering me, though it's getting to a point where the more I work on the darker reds and browns, the more the rust-coloured bits pop into something that looks orange.  I bet at the pace I'm going with this, I can probably finish it by the end of the month.  That would be cool.

The Mighty Thor

This is another one that's murdering my shoulder.  I think my big wishlist item for this year is a side-clamping stand that will still hold a camera.  That's the big problem I have with stands: the camera aspect.  But this one's so tall that my shoulder started to hurt, so I had to move on to a lower page to continue working on it.  Once I get past the top row of pages, it'll be a bit easier though.  It's kind of a shame that the photos are all crummy, but hopefully with my new setup getting to a good place, I'll actually be able to get decent photos that don't require being thrown into Photoshop.

Spider-man

The Patreon project is very slow going, but it is going.  I'm going to try to slip a few extra streams in here and there as I have time, but probably not until after I get my room finished.  Because this is another one that I know can go real quickly, if I just have the time to work on it.  According to my calendar, the next Patreon stream is on Tuesday, so we'll see how much I can get done then.

Fenrir

I'm getting pretty far with this one.  It's kind of a mess, and there have been a bunch of places where I've had to stitch over what was done previously because it was all kinds of wrong, but it's going.  Instead of working across the rows, I decided to jump down and start working on Hilde instead.  Up close, her face looks really grey, but zoomed out like this, it kind of works?  It'll probably look even better once I get the entire page filled in.  All the white is probably what's throwing it off. If I don't get this one done this year, I'll be surprised.

Archer

This is not actually the full thing.  It's not even close.  In fact, there's some stuff I've previously worked on that you can't see, because this thing is ENORMOUS.  I'll try to get a better photo next time to show that, and you can kind of see it in this week's Flosstube video.  But I started this one long ago, when I was just a babby stitcher who thought starting in the centre was the rule, and that gridding was cheating.  Well, fuck that.  I spent all night gridding up a quarter of it (seriously.  Enormous), and went to work on page 1, where I belonged.  Because like the raven, I realised I was going to get very confused on which pages went were before too long.  I will not finish this one this year.  I may not finish it next year.  It's that big.

Villainous

And the last one for the week: Villainous!  It's going faster than I expected, which is a surprise.  I didn't think there were that many colours in it, until I was adding it to Patreon last night.  It has 275.  That's insane.  I now realise that it probably goes quickly because most of the pages aren't complete, on account of being a circle and all.  But I've got to the point where you can kind of see Black Hat's grumpy little face there, and I've realised that I'm going to run out of blue and 505 will probably wind up being a few different colours.  SIGH.  Oh well. from Blogger http://ift.tt/2mc2Eob via IFTTT

[milesyart]

Weekly WIPs

It's amazing how much easier it is to keep on top of doing these posts when I actually have weekly progress to show.  I don't have as much as I did last week, but I have some stuff to show.  Holidays will get in the way like that, and I spent a few days favouring one piece over any others, which also lowered the number. [[more]]

Lazy Leopard

This is what three hours of parking on a confetti-filled nightmare looks like.  The most stitches any one colour has had so far has been three.  It's awful, and it's going to take me a decade to finish this one.  But it's also going to look amazing, so there's that. But seriously, I do not think this will be part of my #YearOfManyFinishes.  Maybe if I do it again in a few years, it can be. But not this year.

Fandral and Sif

  This is one of the ones I spent some time favouring.  I think it accounts for 2-3 days of work.  I'm not sure.  I worked on this one over Christmas, while we were stuck on the mountain, and then a little bit more when I got home.  I still can't get over how smooth and even the cel shading is on this one.  It's an earlier design I made, I think before I understood the importance of scattering the colours before importing the image, so it surprises me that it looks as good as it does. Luckily, I designed all three panels at the same time, so when it comes time to do the next one, I won't have to sit down and try to figure out what I did years ago, and they'll all match.

Black Raven

I got hardly anything done on this one.  Some black.  Not a lot of black, but some.  I got to this one at a time when I was more tired than I realised, and mostly managed to just tape the edges up since I hadn't done that before.  That was the significant portion of the work on this project, I think.

Fenrir

Got a lot of progress done on this one this week.  It was also while working on this one that I realised I could take the shade off my lamp in my bedroom and work under better light conditions.  I'm not sure why it never occurred to me to do that, but there it is. This one is absent from the video that will be going up tomorrow, because I didn't realise until after I'd already filmed and uploaded it that this project got left at my grandmother's. I went back up there the other day to go fetch it, and got a bunch of work done on it last nigh.  I feel like this is one that will get finished very soon, especially with the amount of work that's already been done on it. For those wondering, this used to be a stitchalong piece, until my PC crashed and I lost the individual files and the breakdown of days.  I managed to retrieve the master file though, and have been going off of that to finish, which has been extraordinarily tricky.  I had to buy a pack of purple highlighters to make it easier to follow, by using the purple to highlight anything that's already been stitched. from Blogger http://ift.tt/2q0Ux2i via IFTTT

[mikodesune-blog]

Weekly wips - 03.

Behold, my messy method of depth perception!