July Updates!

Greetings one and all!

Well another month has come and gone, and before I move on to August projects, I thought it was time to give a bit of a round up regarding July's projects -- which, like my post's last month -- have been a bit thin on the ground!

July has been quite a hectic month in terms of socialising -- I went to see the last Harry Potter film last week with my brother and throughly enjoyed that (can't wait for the blu-ray now) and last Thursday I finally got to see one of my favorite metal bands, Iron Maiden, in concert (I've only been a fan for 23 years and this was my first gig!)  They were awesome, putting it midly.

I've also had a lot of meetings with my local jobcentre to step up my hunt for work which despite promises that they can help me do X, Y and Z have sadly been a bit lacking!  I have another review tomorrow, which again, I'm not holding much hope on!

Still, despite this, I took the incentive to get an appointment with a careers advisor through Next Step which help people back into work through guidance and learning.  I am not sure my skills need imporving on, but so far it's been very helpful in helping me steer a career which has been stuck in the mud for the past 12 months!

I also attended a "work club" this morning for a few hours.  This enables people to look for jobs in local papers and use the internet -- you can also update/print off CV's and letters for job applications!  Well, it saves me using my printer at home (which has just run out of ink anyway!)

So onto the stitching ... this has suffered throughout July.  After all my ferverent stitching in June, I was hoping I would be able to keep it up into July.  I think all the stitching I did in June helped me cope with the grief of my dad's passing, but during July I have been extremely un-motivated and as such designing new patterns and working on existing ones has suffered -- I think the heat doesn't help either :(.

I think it might be a while before the Pokemon blackwork patterns take off.  Those who watch me regularly will know that a while ago I featured a blackwork design for Articuno that I had started.  I realised that July's theme of Pokemon would be ideal to finish this, so I picked it up where I had finised off.

This is what I have do so far:

Articuno -- waiting for some feathers to ruffle!!!

I started working on the fills, but after doing the crest and his feet, I decided that I didn't like the fill I had chosen for the body/wings!  This is now going back to the drawing board and I suspect I won't be picking this up again for another month or two.

I have completed some smaller stuffs but the other blackwork designs I have charted didn't get done because I never got round to them and I have other things I want to do this month.  I suppose if I get bored of working on this month's projects, I can always return to them.

So I think I've waffled long enough and well done to anyone who's persevered this long.  Now I'm off to look at charting some requests I've had!  Hopefully I'll be back later in the week with more stitchy updates, but until then...

Keep Kalm and Cross-stitch! xx