The 5 Year Cash Race

Half done!

2010-09-30T18:54:00.000-07:00

It's official, I did a count a few weeks ago, and I'm half done with my HAED! I decided to count my progress because I just finished one row, so it'd be nice to see where I was up to. Honestly, I feel a little bit disappointed, I'd envisioned myself reaching really high numbers...like 70%. Vain hopes, but you just never know how far you've gone with a HAED design. Here's my WIP picture as of two weeks ago.

Doesn't it look kinda completed? Haha, that's why I was hoping most of it was done already. It's amazing how small an area one page takes.

In other news, I've started a side-business-y thing of buying / selling stuff (isn't that what everyone's doing nowadays?). It's never going to sustain me as a full-time job, but it gives me some extra pocket money each month, not much....but enough to make me happy! Enough for say...15 new books a month. Or 10 fancy meals a month. :D

We're ba-ack!

2010-07-15T18:38:00.000-07:00

Yes, as Eel said in her post, we've gone missing for the longest time. Chalk it up to laziness, and the fact that she's now unemployed, which funnily enough, means we don't talk to each other online that often anymore. So, it's been quite a few months since our last update, so expect to see a great big difference in my HAED, not like Eel's. ;)

And, since you probably can't remember what it looked like the last time, and also to rub it in Eel's face, here's a side by side comparison of the two.

I'm really pleased with myself! All the bodice and lower skirt bits have super scattered stitches and it took ages to complete, which is why I took breaks by doing the side pages, as you can see on the right, there's a bit done there as well.

I'm trying to do as much as possible now because....I'm planning the longest holiday of my life! Eel's going to be doing a 3 month holiday next year, and if all goes well, I'm going to be joining her for a month in Europe. Doesn't it sound luxurious?? Of course, the fact is, we'll probably be staying at cheaper B&B places, and skimping on food, but we'll be in Europe for a month!

I've been jumping from country to country, trying to decide where to go, and I'm still not sure. We've pretty much decided on Italy, the other countries that are still a maybe include France, Switzerland and Austria. So much to do, so little time to do it in. And of course, money is always going to be a factor as well. *sigh*

So, with all this excitement coming up, it's best if I get cracking on my HAED so that I can finish it as soon as possible, and then I'll have lots of money to celebrate beating Eel in our competition. :p

Super Long Hiatus

2010-07-14T18:39:00.000-07:00

Its been months since our last post and probably the same amount of time since I've done completed my quota consistently. I've been really neglecting my HAED and hiding from Sae because I don't want to face up to the fact that I'm lagging behind so much haha.

This week however, I'm finally back to my daily quota. Just need to keep that up for the next 2 years *sigh*

Here's my progress pics which sadly won't be much different from my last I imagine:

I haven't been completely without needle though. For our 1st year marriage anniversary (marriage, not wedding; that's in another month), I got an iPad! :D I'm completely attached to my iPad now and decided it needed a case so I could carry it all around. Being a cheapskate, I decided to make my own. And here's the result:

Its not as well-made as I'd like it to be but it was a good lesson for me and I shall make another one soon rectifying all the problems that happened in this first one. It took me ages cos it was all hand-sewn. If I had a sewing machine, this would have taken me a day I reckon.

Now that I'm free of my guilty HAED conscience, I can stop hiding from Sae. ;)

HAED Art and Sculpture Art

2010-04-18T23:17:00.000-07:00

So we're almost at the 2 year mark and I'm probably only a quarter done! Woe is me. I've done quite a lot lately though, thanks to my new career of being a lady of leisure. However, despite no longer needing to spend 8 hours a day at the office, I still don't want to be replacing that time with just HAED-ing. I can really only manage 1-2 hours a day max while watching TV or something. Beyond that, I just want to chuck the whole thing away and cry. :)

Well here's my progess:

I've been swapping between that nice big blog on the top that's not really joined to anything and the holes in the side pages. That big blob is the really awesome page I started a while back and its the only thing keeping me sane while filling in the holes on the side.

Other than HAED, I've been busy with a few other things. One was going to the Ron Mueck exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria. See that sculpture on that front page of that site? When you stand next to it, an adult would probably come up to half way of its height. The exhibition was split between sculptures of giant people or tiny little people. And all super realistic. I got to see it pretty close up and you can't tell it apart from real human skin at all! Here's a photo I took with my iPhone (hence the not so awesome quality) of the hand from that same sculpture:

It was a really interesting exhibition, so if you get a chance to see Ron Mueck's work, I'd recommend you to go for it, it will amaze and slightly scare you.

Another page done, and...the iPad!

2010-04-15T21:33:00.000-07:00

OK, boring stuff first, I finished yet another page of my HAED yesterday. Seems like we're only posting up updates every time we finish a page! So, here it is:

In other more exciting news, I had my first glimpse of a real iPad today! One of my colleagues had an acquaintance who just acquired one, so we all gathered around it, marvelling at how beautiful it looked. It's resulted in me wondering whether I want an iPhone, or an iPad!

An iPad works out to be cheaper, because I won't have to change my phone plan. It's bigger, and it'd be really good for reading ebooks and watching stuff. However, it's so big, that it might be problematic to carry it around all the time and might be heavy and not too nice to use frequently. Hmm, how do I decide??

I'll be waiting till some of my colleagues (who put in their orders about an hour after seeing the iPad) get their iPads so I can try it out and see for myself. How about you, iPad, iPhone, or both? :D

Yet Another New Page :)

2010-03-17T21:42:00.000-07:00

Its been ages since our last update. But yet, still not much to update. As Sae said, I'm struggling very much with my current 4-5 pages. They are just completely yucky pages! But all is not lost, I've started a new page! Hahaha, that hole is getting deeper and deeper.

I'm definitely way behind Sae at the moment if she's already half way through. :(

But Sae has forgotten one vital thing...in a couple of weeks, I will be unemployed and have as many hours to HAED as I like. That's right, I've finally taken the plunge and resigned. At the moment, I have no plans other than to go home to Malaysia for a while.

Though I really don't intend to spend all my time HAED-ing, I have many other things to do. Of which I will be blogging about in future updates. :)

Here's my progress pic, that tiny little patch that's in the middle of nowhere up the top is my newly started page. It is the loveliest page so far. :)

I'm super paranoid that I haven't counted correctly and have started that page in the wrong position. But I counted it over and over and over and its not too far off from any other stitches so I think I'm alright.

Just 2 more weeks before I'm freeeeee....

Nice page finished!

2010-03-15T19:37:00.000-07:00

Well, as the title says, I've just finished the first page of the 4th row. That was a nice page, because it was at the side so mostly all background, with a bit of the purple circle and a leaf. And now, I'll be moving on to more hair bits.

It's getting harder to remember how long it's been since we first started this competition, it feels like I've been doing it for forever. I had to check the blog to see when we started, which was May 2008. That means that we've now been at it for 1 year 11 months! If I'm not mistaken, I *think* I'm at the halfway point, which would mean I'm ahead of schedule. And hopefully, ahead of Eel, too. Haha, she seems to be struggling with her current pages, so it's a good opportunity for me to zoom ahead.

Did anyone catch the first F1 race of the season? I did, mainly because Michael Schumacher was making his return, and I'm a HUGE fan. I pretty much stopped watching F1 when he retired! Plus, Lotus was making their debut, and since it's pretty much a Malaysian team, I was interested to see how they'd do.

I must say that it was a SNOOZE-FEST! There's a new ruling that there's no fuel stops, the F1 cars have bigger fuel tanks and run from start to finish. They only pit stop to change their tires. This means that they drive more conservatively to save fuel, and was soo boring because they didn't attempt much overtaking. Basically, the finishers were in the same position as how they started, except for Vettel who had a spark plug problem. I hope something changes soon, because if it continues as it is, I'm not going to be watching anymore, even though Michael Schumacher might be back!

HAED Progress So-So, Karma Progress Pretty Good!

2010-02-09T19:02:00.000-08:00

I really am turning into Sae. ;) Or I'm picking up all her bad habits anyway. :p

Though, I am doing one good thing, and that is being a fundraiser for the Good Friday Appeal, which helps collect funds for Victoria's Royal Childen's Hospital. And that's one thing that's been taking up quite a fair bit of my time. Besides being a fundraiser, I'm also going to be running in the Run for the Kids event, which is the main fundraising event for the Appeal. It will be my longest distance ever at 14.6km, so I want to train lots for that so I don't end up walking the event or worse, passing out!

Please help support me in raising funds for the kids: http://www.everydayhero.com.au/eelengchang
Click on the Donate Now button and all proceeds will go straight to the Good Friday Appeal, nothing dodgy on my end is possible! :)

Back in HAED land, I've managed to keep up to 1000 stitches a week, but only because I'm skipping around 4 pages! My progress pic is so hole-y:

I did however finish the last 9 stitches on one of the side pages so yeay!

I wonder if I'll go back to just 1 page at a time...

Slacking off in blogging

2010-02-07T22:47:00.000-08:00

It seems like every post that we put up on this blog is a "Wow, we haven't been blogging for so long" kind of post. It's been a month since we last updated our blog. Not sure why, it just seems that once we got out of the habit of blogging every two weeks, it seemed easier to just not blog for ages!

Well, I took a picture of my HAED yesterday, because I finished another page. That was a good opportunity to take it out of my Qsnaps and take a picture in all it's glory.

Pretty, isn't it? :) I've finished the majority of three rows worth of pages, hooray! I feel like that's a major milestone for me. What's more, is the fact that I think that I've finished most of the hard bits of my design. If you look at the full picture below, lots of the confetti bits were in her hair, the wings, and the top of her outfit. And I've ALMOST completed those sections! So, I'm crossing my fingers that what's to come will be much easier. Although the dress folds do look kind of confetti-ish, as well.

What's funny is the way that I've been rubbing off on Eel. When we first started our competition (all the way back in May 2008!), I used to skip all around different pages. I used to do quite a few pages at one go. Eel used to say, "Isn't that confusing? It's so hard to keep track of where you are?" And now, she just told me she's working on four pages at once! Furthermore, I used to cheat a bit as well. When there was just ONE stitch, and it was in an area which was more or less the same color, I'd cheat and use a different color so that I wouldn't have to start a new thread just for one X. And again, she said, "If you keep on doing that, it'll look different from the actual picture. You might get something totally different!" And guess what? She's doing it too! :D

Anyway, I've been inspired this past week, and I did a whopping 1.4k worth of stitches, here's hoping I can keep it up for the future and I'll crush Eel in our competition!

Happy 2010!

2010-01-11T03:40:00.001-08:00

Eel: Wow, we've been lazy, no posts since November. Well, Happy New Year everyone! I went back to Malaysia over the Christmas/New Year break and so Sae and I got together to take photos of our pieces.

For my part, I've really been falling behind and didn't do any at all during my 2 week break in Malaysia. But I really have to get cracking and catching up to Sae, so hopefully 2010 will bring me renewed HAED-ing energy!

As for our holiday, it was a really great one. One of our friends got married and had 3 receptions! We attended 2 out of 3 and it was good fun. This time around, I got to catch up with my friends quite a lot as many were on holiday. And my entire family was around for the whole time too, so it was really fun. Not to mention noisy and chaotic with 4 little kids in the house. We did a lot less touristy things this time around and more social family/friends type activities. Oh, and eating. We ate. A Lot!

Sae: I haven't exactly been productive with my HAED either. Knowing that Eel didn't bring back her stitching supplies to Malaysia and therefore couldn't be doing any for two whole weeks made me kind of lazy as well. Add the fact that I was on the arm / wing part with lots of one stitches also made me not want to do it.

Also, we took a trip down to Penang (me, Eel, and our other halves) for a good holiday of eating. Haha, it seems like we do nothing but eat in Malaysia. We ate at soo many places in Penang, even trying the same dish but from different stalls, to make sure that we had eaten at the best place.

I'll be joining a club soon, so that will probably knock out quite a bit of HAED time there (hopefully I'll be able to go and exercise lots!). It seems I've hit the mid-to-late twenties phase, where everyone's complaining about their weight. I actually don't really care about my weight, I just want to lose my tummy! Enough about me, back to our HAED...

Eel: Well, here's our photos (Sae looks like she's half way!!!):

Another Crazy Competition

2009-11-13T12:10:00.000-08:00

As if a 5 year cross stitch competition wasn't enough! As Sae says in her post, we're competing once again. Her post has all the details of the competition so I won't repeat it again.

Here's what my farm was like at the start of the competition:

And here it is when I took the screenshot a few days ago, I'm slightly in the lead yeay!!

If anyone else other than Sae had suggested this, I would've said Nah right away. What a waste of time! But then Sae and I always seem to compete at heaps of things. When we were in primary school, we were deadly Speed rivals (the card game, not the drug). Before HAED, we went head-to-head in a blog battle.

Luckily this competition is only short and doesn't really impact on HAED time. This week, I've managed to catch up on the 300 stitches that I didn't do in the previous week to fulfill my quota. I decided to move onto yet another new page, this time moving upwards. It's such a lovely page! HUGE clumps of the same thread. :) That's the only way I could have caught up I think.

Here's my progress pic, as you can see, its a bit all over the place:

Ah well, better get back to it and in the meantime, strategize on how to farm harder than Sae!

Another competition??

2009-11-10T23:20:00.000-08:00

Yes, you read that title correctly. Eel and I are such competitors, we're not satisfied with just the one competition, but had to start another one! This time, we're having a Farmville competition! Since we're both playing it, we thought it'd be fun to spice up the game a little.

We both took screenshots of our farm at the same time, and we're going to compare the extra money and points in mid December. The loser has to buy dinner for the winner. So far, it looks like I'm doing pretty badly! I'm about 500 points behind Eel. :( It looks like the difference is she plants a lot of 4 hour crops, and I don't, because I try not to play Farmville at work. *sigh* Looks like I'll be buying her dinner in December! Here's a shot of my farm, as of yesterday. Notice the lack of organization? Haha...

Oh yes, another reason I'm falling behind in Farmville? Mafia Wars! I succumbed after seeing all the Mafia Wars updates in my feed, and I was just so curious to know what it was about. And I'm doomed, I'm spending lots of time on it. I'm almost up to level 40 now, and that's less than a week of playing. Uh-oh!

And after all that, mustn't forget about HAEDing, which is where all the competing started in the first place. I've been sticking to my quota, just barely. For the first time in ages, I didn't do a lot of extra last week, I did my quota...and 4 extra stitches. *sigh* Darn you, dress! When will my torture be over?

Evil Farmville and Cafe World!

2009-10-27T22:19:00.001-07:00

Sheesh! Thanks to Sae, I now have to add Farmville-ing and Cafe World-ing to my list of things to do. :p The first few days was a flurry, because I didn't know my way around it so much, I was randomly planting or cooking things and then always had to check into Facebook to see if it was finished. Now I'm a bit more organised, I do my major planting at about 11am and 11pm. And then during the day, I sometimes farm at intervals of 2 or 4 hours. I'm not that into Cafe World, the food seems to spoil too easily and I really don't have that much time to sit around or log in at exactly the right time to make sure I serve my food.

During the day, I often get distracted by work or lose track of time so I stuff up my planting times sometimes. At night, its much easier, because my laptop is on a little table next to the couch, right next to where I HAED. So I just keep it open and keep an eye out for when my crops are ready for harvesting.

This week hasn't been a good week for me so far in terms of HAED. On Monday, we received our printed wedding photos that we wanted to hand out to people. So Monday night was all about sorting through photos and packaging it up to send off. And last night, I went out for Lebanese food with a couple of my high school friends. It was yummy and very 'lamby'. It seemed like all dishes had lamb in it! But it was very yummy, especially the home made baklava and halawa desserts. By the end of the night, we were really, really stuffed and we didn't manage to finish the food so looks like I'll be having more lamb for dinner. :)

Luckily I went over my quota last week so I'm not too behind! Here's my latest progress pic:

Tonight we're going over to Chen-Po's mum's house for dinner. I wonder if it will be another non HAED night... Go play more time management games Sae!

Do you play Farmville / Cafe World?

2009-10-27T18:41:00.000-07:00

I've never been on Facebook this much before, and it's all due to the Facebook games! For the longest time, I didn't log into Facebook, then I started hearing people talk about Farmville this, Farmville that. So, being curious, I added it and started playing.

At first, it didn't seem that interesting. You plant your crops, wait a few hours, then harvest them. But then...I started to get hooked. I unlocked more crops, expanded my farm, and now I'm playing it daily! The funny thing is that in Farmville, you need a certain number of neighbors before you can buy a bigger plot of land. So, I asked Eel to be my neighbor, it didn't matter if she played or not, all I needed was one more neighbor, and she agreed. Now, it seems like she's playing it quite frequently as well. :D

The other game I'm playing on Facebook is by the same company that developed Farmville, and this game's called Cafe World. You have stoves where you cook your food, and you can hire waiters to help serve your food. Every level that you gain, you either unlock a new type of food, or new stoves you can purchase. Is this what it feels like to be a restaurant manager? Haha..

For my HAED, I got fedup of the one stitches, so I moved on to the quarter page at the end of my first row, and I finished that. So, I took an overall picture of it before moving back to the annoying dress page. *sigh*

Less HAED, more games!

2009-10-18T19:44:00.000-07:00

Well, as the title says, I've done less HAED this week as compared to the past five weeks. In the previous five weeks, I managed to hit the minimum 1k mark, sometimes a bit more. However, this week, I didn't manage to do that. And I blame it all on Eel.

A couple of weeks ago, we were talking about Sally's Spa, a time management game where you're Sally and you run your own spa. You've got to direct people to the showers, massages, etc, and keep upgrading your spa with your profits so that you can handle more services and more people.

Hmm, looking at the screenshot kinda makes me want to play it again. :D Maybe Eel will feel the same way, and then she won't be HAEDing so much either. Hahaha. Anyway, Eel had just bought it for her iPhone, and I had previously played Sally's Salon on my DS. So, I was interested because I really enjoyed Sally's Salon, and I started playing it on my laptop. From there, my stitching time all went downhill.

After Sally's Spa, I moved on to Wedding Dash (you're a wedding planner, and you need to choose the food menu, seat guests, deliver food), then Farm Frenzy, then Wedding Dash 2, then Turbo Pizza & Turbo Subs....the list just goes on and on!

Haha, is it surprising that I've done so little AND my update is one week late? Furthermore, the pic will look like very little has been done because last week, I was working on the quarter page that would finish up the first row. Mainly because I was feeling lazy of all the single stitches. However, this week, I moved back to the sucky dress page, because I didn't want to leave it till the last minute. I didn't want to take it off the Qsnaps, so it really looks like nothing much has been done. But anyway, here's my update picture.

Stitching Sick

2009-10-15T22:19:00.000-07:00

I've been sick for the past 2 weeks with tonsillitis. It really sucks! My throat hurts so bad constantly and I've had not much energy to do anything. But being stuck at home, I've managed to chip away on my HAED to keep up with my quota. If I had my full energy, I probably could have done 2 or more times my quota and not feel so tired. :p

I've finally finished my annoying page of single stitches. :D Right now, I'm tackling 3 pages all at the same time. One is a small side page to finish my second row of pages. Another is on the 3rd row and the other page is on the 4th row. I get paranoid sometimes that I get mixed up between the 2 full pages but they do look fairly different so no mistakes so far.

Here's my progress pic:

All 3 pages look quite annoying but its quite nice to pick and choose clumps on all 3 pages to do here and there.

I just had a horrible thought in my head; by next May or around there, I need to have about half the cloth finished!

A Few Good Weeks

2009-09-29T03:47:00.000-07:00

Since I set myself my 1k limit, I've actually been pretty good with it. And I've even surged ahead last week so even though its only Tuesday, I'm already almost at 500 stitches. So I'm definitely very proud of myself these last few couple of weeks since my last update.

When I went to Tokyo 2 years ago, I found the Square Enix character shop and went on a bit of spending frenzy there. When my purchases were getting added up, they told me I could have a free gift if I spent just a bit more (d'uh). So I decided why not and got 3 keychains that I had been eyeing. A Cactuar for Chen-Po, a Moogle for myself and a Chocobo for Sae. And that got me a free note pad. Not too awesome a free gift but I didn't really regret it at the time. Its one of those really thick square pads where you tear of little squares of paper as you go through them.

Well, now I'm quite pleased I got it after all, as two years later, I'm using that pad to write down my number of stitches as I stitch. And it's definitely helping me fulfill my quota and actually motivate me to do that little bit more.

I previously tried using my laptop and my iPhone to keep track of my stitches but I found that its just such a hassle. Sometimes, writing something down with a pencil and a paper is just so much easier.

At the moment, I'm trying very hard to finish a page. But not wanting to get all depressed over the single stitches, I started stitching 2 new pages as well. Here are 2 pictures showing where I'm currently working on.

I think I'll take a break from HAED tonight and play Plants Vs Zombies :D. Check it out, its super addictive and fun. Oh, if you want to buy it, get it from Big Fish Games or Steam, its almost 3 times cheaper than Pop Cap Games!

The dress of DOOM

2009-09-28T20:55:00.000-07:00

I wish my fairy was naked...it'd be ever so much easier to stitch her then, although perhaps not very socially acceptable. :p Her dress is so tedious, and it's super slow going. I sat down and counted one large block of 100 stitches, and inside that block, there were over 60 different colored threads! I've only done the top of her dress, and there's lots more to go. The only good thing about this part is that it makes it seem like I've done a lot of work, because the colors are all dark as compared to the light background.

In other news, it feels like I've been going through a little bit of the growing up process. I've sort of started looking for a place to buy, most likely a condo / apartment. Nothing really serious, but if I saw something that was promising, well...who knows what would happen. I went to see a 800k condo about two weeks ago. It's not like I have that kind of money, but I just wanted to see what it would look like. Perhaps that was a mistake, as all I can think about now is buying that condo! Haha, if only...

I've also just started playing Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days on the DS. I played both Kingdom Hearts I and II on the PS2 (I liked KHI better), so I was definitely going to play this new release. So far, it's all right...nothing too fantastic. The graphics and sound are amazing, as I expected. Gameplay so far is ... moderate. Instead of a seamless storyline, you play missions everyday, somewhat similar to The World Ends With You. Some examples of missions would be to defeat X number of Heartless, or to defeat a particular enemy. Perhaps it takes longer to get into the game, I've only played up till day 22 so far. I mustn't get too addicted to it, though, as that'd take away some of my HAED time! :)

A New Quota For Me :(

2009-09-14T05:40:00.000-07:00

As I have been slacking off very badly this year, I realised that I probably would have to push my daily quota up. So last week, I did some rough calculations of how much I'd done and the answer is....not very much at all! :'( To be more precise, I'm at about 54300 stitches. Almost 20k behind Sae!!! *Crawls into hole in despair*

Well so, doing some more maths, it looks like I will need to do a daily quota of 136 stitches. Rounding it way up, I'm going to attempt to do 1000 stitches a week. And as long as I do more than 940 stitches, I should be on track to finish by my 30th birthday (our competition finished Chinese New Year after that).

So while the maths isn't so dire just yet, just knowing how way ahead Sae is, is still so very disheartening!

Ah well, it was my own fault for being so lazy so I'll just have to suck it up and Do My Best!

Here's my pic so far, I thought I'd take a overview pic too, just like Sae's:

This week I did not quite get to my desired 1000k, I got up to 961. Which is not too bad for 4 stitching sessions if I may say so myself!

Some stats & pix from NZ

2009-09-13T20:20:00.000-07:00

Yes, yes, we're late in updating our blog again. We haven't been HAEDing that much because of Eel's wedding in Melbourne, and my subsequent trip to New Zealand. That being the case, we decided to wait until we did a substantial amount of stitching before updating the blog.

Eel's wedding was great, it was small, intimate, and not a lot of fuss. Just my type of wedding. :D I always joke that it'd be so much easier just to elope to Vegas and get married by Elvis rather than have a big wedding! She's the first one of our group to get married, I suppose we'll all start following sooner or later!

After her wedding, I went on an 8 day holiday to New Zealand. It was a wonderful holiday, relaxing isn't exactly the word, we drove over 2000kms in that time! But it was gorgeous scenery all round, some of our highlights were kayaking in the Abel Tasman, glacier trekking, and Milford Sound. There are quite a few more pictures on my blog, this is just a few of the pictures we took.

Obviously, I didn't bring my HAED along for the trip, so I lost out over 2 weeks of stitching time. When I returned, I jumped right into it, unfortunately for me, it was lots of confetti stitches because of the hair. Aren't most peoples' hair just one solid colour?? Anyway, I finally finished my page last Friday, and I decided to take it off the Qsnaps and iron it, and take a nice overview picture.

Eel also bugged me to do a count of my stitches. I've had no idea in the past how much I've done, because in my style of stitching, I overlap several pages at one go. So, on Saturday, I sat down with all the pages around me, a pen and calculator in hand, and started counting. I've roughly done 71,750 and my total for this design is 214,800. That makes it about 33% done. Also, my daily quota is about 130 a day, so if you calculate how many days it's been since we started, as of yesterday, I should have completed 65,130. That means I'm about 50 days ahead of schedule, woohoo! :D

Stupid Single Stitches Annhiliated!!!

2009-08-25T08:50:00.000-07:00

Wow, I'm super late :) and I'd probably be even later if not for Sae sitting right next to me nagging me to blog :p.

So updates! Well I just had my wedding which I'm using as my excuse for not blogging and not doing any HAED at all actually. I really did not touch it for about a full 2 weeks and I was really too busy to do any.

I'll post photos of the wedding later when I get them back. Overall, I'm really happy with how it all went. It was pretty stress-free, simple and I had heaps of fun. There was time to meet and greet everyone, eat and well just have fun through the day. It was really great having my whole family over here in Melbourne and of course it was awesome having Sae over here too. :)

Two days ago, I finally sat down and decided to do all those stupid single stitches that I had left over from, well pretty much the start of this year. So I laid out the last 4-5 pages on the floor, took some note paper and pencil and my entire collection of thread and spent about an hour or more clearing these stupid stitches. It took ages and I had an achy back by the end of it and all I achieved was maybe about 10 stitches! But at last, I can finally abandon those pages and not have to worry about them anymore.

Here's my photo of my latest update:

Anyway, I wrote this post last night but right now at this time of posting, Sae has just left Melbourne and I guess now everything will go back to normal. Work is also slowing down so I will have more time for HAED. So watch out Sae!! It won't take me long to catch up! Actually it will, but I will get there...

Here's a pic of me and Sae taken at the airport tonight:

Thanks so much for coming over to Melb Sae!! It was really great and made our wedding so much more special and memorable. :)

Goodbye HAED, hello Melbourne and New Zealand!

2009-08-11T23:19:00.000-07:00

Well, this is going to be my last HAED update for the month, I'll be on the way to the airport in about 4 hours, off to Melbourne for Eel's wedding. Then in a few days time, to New Zealand for a week's holiday, then back to Melbourne again. I'm definitely not bringing my HAED with me, I can't imagine ever bringing it on holiday, it's so bulky!

I've been trying to do one day's extra work each week so that I wouldn't fall behind my schedule when I left for my holiday. I'm not sure whether I've covered enough days or not, but at this point in time, I don't really care! I'm coming to the main part of the picture, which means less background, and less blocky areas for me to stitch. It's really obvious in my picture below, just how non-blocky it is!

I've been kind of freaking out about the New Zealand trip. Eel HAD to pick this time of year to get married, which happens to be winter in New Zealand. Apparently, the road to one of the places I was planning to visit has been closed for 12 days due to avalanches! Plus driving during winter is going to be scary, we have to rent snow chains, and I have no idea how to even use snow chains. I hardly drive much in Malaysia, so it'll be interesting to see how it goes in New Zealand. Thankfully, we drive on the same side of the road, so it shouldn't be too much of a change. I suppose I'll be delegating most of the driving to the other half, and I'll be navigating for the most part. :D

Only 1 1/2 more hours till I get to go home, and finish my packing! See you all in about a month. Bye!

Harry Potter and the non-HAEDing Week

2009-07-27T06:00:00.000-07:00

I somehow managed to get an alright amount done. I was afraid that when I looked at my photo from the last update, I would see almsot no difference. But, its somehow inspiring to see quite a difference after all. :)

Last week, I had the worst number of work hours! On Monday I was at work til 5.30am. The next day went til 3am and the day after went til 1am. I didn't quite feel like much HAED-ing after that.

Things have slowed down a bit so I managed to get a couple of days of stitching over the weekend.

Here's my progress pic:

I caught the latest Harry Potter movie in the last weekend. I'm a Harry Potter fan, I love the books, I've watched all the movies and I'm a bit embarassed to admit, I've also played all the games. The books are awesome, the movies are fun and the games are well, that last one was pretty good. I found this latest installment of the movie to be quite alright. I thought it was slightly slow and it had gotten a bit too grey. But I was very excited and happy watching it, but I think that's 80% due to me being a fan.

I think this movie missed out on a lot of little details that was quite important. For one thing, it didn't really focus much at all on the Half Blood Prince or the whole mystery of who it is. Also the whole Lupin and Tonks thing got fast forwarded. And it didn't have much of a continuing feel to it from the last movie.

After watching the movie, I felt like re-reading the book so instead of using my non-work time to HAED, I read the last 2 books in the Harry Potter series instead. I hear the next movie is going to be split into 2. I think that will be good cos there's so much stuff they need to tie up from that last book!

Anyway, for some reason, I feel like I want to get the game too. But I heard its sort of crap. Will my common sense win out or my fangirlness? We'll see...

First page done on my 3rd row

2009-07-24T01:52:00.000-07:00

Well, I won't even bother apologizing for the late updates, I think that it's something you all with have to come to terms with from now on. It's amazing what a change MSN makes in our lives. With it, we were constantly pushing each other to HAED faster, update the blog on time, and all that. Now, it looks like we're averaging 5 days late and more to update our blogs!

It did give me time to finish up my page, though. It's the first page of my 3rd row! It sounds like a lot, but it'll probably bring me back down to earth if I were to check how many rows I actually have in the design. Anyway, here's where I'm at.

I should really blog a bit more about what else I've been up to, but it's a lazy Friday afternoon, after a big lunch. My company usually goes for more fancy / faraway lunches on Fridays as we have a long lunch hour. I had yummy Indian rice with fried chicken and curries plus a coffee laced with fresh cow's milk. And the combination of it all plus the quietness makes me not want to do work, which is the reason the blog's being updated now. :D

So, farewell till next time...whenever that will be!

Late, late, late!

2009-07-08T20:28:00.000-07:00

Most surprisingly, I'm later to publish our update this week compared to Eel. Well, I did remember, but I was too lazy to take a picture of my HAED. And yesterday, when I tried to blog, for some reason, Blogger was hanging, so I decided to put it off till today.

It's been a really lazy week for me, it's only Thursday (my HAED week starts on a Monday), and I've already missed out HAEDing on two days. I don't know why, but by the time dinner and all finishes, it's 10, and I'm feeling sleepy already! Added to that the fact that I've recently started wrapping all the new books that I buy to prevent dog ears, and there are piles and piles of books to wrap!

So, here's my progress as of two days ago.

It's looking really patchy now, I seem to have misplaced the thread for the hole on the left, and the middle parts have lots of one stitches, which I'm putting off for as long as I can.

I too, have been watching stuff while I stitch. What else is there to do? Audio books don't appeal to me at all, so that leaves me with TV. I just purchased the full set of Sherlock Holmes DVDs from Amazon.

I love mysteries, from Agatha Christie, to Sherlock Holmes, to chick lit mysteries. I suppose it began when I was young, from reading Enid Blyton's Five Find-Outers & Dog series. There's just something about the whole investigative process that appeals to me, finding all the clues and discovering who the culprit is. So, when Amazon had a 75% discount on this boxset, I bought it.

I've watched the first disc so far, and I really like it. I wasn't too sure I would at first, so I watched an episode on YouTube. It's so different, because the episode on YouTube was chopped up into 5 - 6 parts, but it gave me the general idea about the show. One disc down, 15 more to go!

Crunch Time

2009-07-07T06:23:00.000-07:00

We're late again I think. Ahh, this lack of MSN communication is really hurting my HAED progress, not to mention my general sanity at work. Having a non-work friend to chit chat with through the working day is really important and therapeutic I think. So, with all that's going on these days, MSN could not pick the worst time to stop working between me and Sae.

Yes, as in the title of my post, I have hit the dreaded crunch time. Last year, when we started this competition, I had not done any overtime at work since the year before. So at that time, I had vague and distant memories of overtime. So it did not enter into my brain to consider how I would manage HAED and crunch time.

Well, this year, our project is almost due and I'm working back late every single night of the week. On good nights, I'm home by 10pm. Which sounds like ample time to HAED, except I'm so damn exhausted and drained that I really just want to lie here doing nothing but watching TV.

Last week, I finally got around to printing myself a new page because I could not bear anymore depressing single stitches. Progress is still slow but at least it feels like my picture is growing. Here's where I'm at:

Another factor lending towards my slowness in HAED-ing is my new addiction to watching Japanese dramas. One of my colleagues brought in a whole heap and I've been just watching them non-stop. And its really hard to stitch while watching something while reading subtitles. The latest that I'm currently watching now is Gokusen. There are 3 seasons altogether and also a movie. I'm up to Season 2.

Gokusen is based on a manga of the same name. Its about Yamaguchi Kumiko who lands her dream job as a high school teacher. However, she gets assigned to be the homeroom teacher of a class filled with delinquents. All her students start out by hating her, cos she is a teacher but one by one, she wins their trust and respect. Mainly because she grew up in a yakuza household (her grandfather is the yakuza boss and she is the next heir) and so she can really kick ass.

Its filled with really OTT slapstick humour and some really stereotype themes. Also, most unbelievable yakuza family ever. Each episodes has the same kind of flow, one of her students gets into trouble, she tries to find out why, they push her away, she persists and on the way teaches them some valuable life lesson and at the end, she ends up protecting them and winning them over. Along the way, she's trying to keep the fact that she comes from a yakuza family a secret and also pick up the courage to pursue her love interest.

Actually I am not sure why I like watching this and there are some cringe-worthy moments. But its still very addictive to watch. I like some of the random stuff they throw in and overall, she is an interesting character. The show overdoes the introduction to her students as you think they'd be the most dangerous, psycho killer type students ever, but actually they're just sorta normal rebellious kids.

This isn't going to be a life-changing show, but its light, humorous and good for emptying my head after a long day of work.

Okay, I guess I should attempt to fulfill my daily quota now...

Oops, I'm late!

2009-06-21T03:56:00.000-07:00

I was meant to blog a few days ago but with MSN being busted between me and Sae, I've had no one reminding (nagging :p) me to update. It finally hit me just now in the shower so I thought I'd better do it now before I forget and tomorrow Sae will scold me somehow.

I've been in a HAED rut lately and pretty much haven't touched it. It really doesn't help that I'm stuck on single stitches trying to finish this page. I think I better print out the next page and move along to gain some momentum.

Anyway, here is my progress pic. As you can see, I'm so close! And yet, still so far....

Some stuff that has been taking up my time? Well firstly I am now legally married :D. Our marriage registration was last Sunday. Check out our wedding rings:

Other news, my mum has just arrived to visit. Maybe she has some wise advice on how to stitch faster!

I'd best get onto some stitching right away!

Start of the 3rd row

2009-06-16T19:04:00.000-07:00

Over the weekend, I finished my 12th full page! That's almost 2 whole rows, except for a little bit at the end, maybe about 3 columns worth. I'm saving that for when I get lazy, as it's in quite nice big chunks and should be finished really easily. So, I've begun on the 3rd row of my design.

We've been really lax about updating our blog lately, I blame it on Eel's recent holiday, and the fact that MSN seems to be buggy, with either one of us not getting each other's messages. I think I haven't spoken her to over a week, perhaps with one intermittent hello message getting through! Well, hopefully we'll get more up to speed with our HAED, I haven't been doing too much lately because I've had some flu virus thingy over a few days.

Let's see...in other news, I'm planning to watch a couple of movies this week. One of the shopping malls is launching their new cinema, and to celebrate, there are free movies the whole weekend. They're not new shows, but shows I haven't watched before. Some of them are shows I might not even have watched, if they weren't free.

Anyway, the two I'm planning to watch are Race to Witch Mountain and Ip Man.

Race to Witch Mountain is the one I'm watching just 'cos it's free. It looks OK, but nothing spectacular. Ip Man looks pretty cool, it's about Ip Man, who was the martial arts master of Bruce Lee and the first to teach the Chinese martial art of Wing Chun openly. It was nominated for 12 Hong Kong Film Awards, winning awards for Best Picture and Best Action Choreography, and lots of people who've watched it said it was excellent, so I can't wait! I just hope the movie lives up to my expectations. :)

Holidaying instead of HAEDing

2009-05-28T06:40:00.000-07:00

Ah I've been super lazy these past few weeks. I have done a total of.....zero stitches pretty much since we went live with our new layout. On the 8th May, I went to Hong Kong for a 9 day holiday. So the days leading up to that was spent mostly working overtime and then packing. And after I got back, well I still haven't got around to doing anything. Instead I've been uploading photos, or surfing the net or well anything but stitch. There's some major changes that I'm going through right now, which I'll share more about in the next update. Well anyway, other parts of my life have been distracting me from stitching. But I should be getting back to it soon.

Well since I have no new progress pics, here's some holiday photos instead:

From Hong Kong

Pottinger St had heaps of stalls selling costumes and fancy dress accessories. And like a lot of other streets in Hong Kong Island, it was really steep.

From Hong Kong

One thing about Hong Kong, there's escalators everywhere! Well, not entirely surprising seeing that its skyscraper haven and when you're not in a building, the roads are all going uphill (And downhill..)

From Hong Kong

I really liked these helpful signs, such a good idea :)

From Hong Kong

We visited Lamma Island one day and I've decided to put this on the top of my list of where I would want to live. It was really so beautiful, peaceful and idyllic.

From Hong Kong

Kowloon really looks like the Hong Kong I imagined and watched on movies.

From Hong Kong

The very well-lit Hong Kong Island, as viewed from the Avenue of Stars at Tsim Sha Tsui

From Hong Kong

The Giant Buddha in Lantau Island, this was just before climbing the 268 steps to get to the Buddha. Lantau Island was also really pretty.

From Hong Kong

Wisdom Path, also on Lantau Island. I think the words are Buddhist scriptures. Its not exactly a very historical place, the pillars are trees from Canada and shipped over to Hong Kong not that long ago. But still, it was quite majestic.

From Hong Kong

Sunset viewed from the Ngong Ping 360 cable car on Lantau Island.

From Hong Kong

Hong Kong skyline during the day. This was taken on the way up to The Peak, while on the tram.

From Hong Kong

Hong Kong is really beautiful and night time is where it shines the most.

From Family, Friends & Myself

I was with Masie and Uya in Hong Kong. Here we are in the Shanghai Tang changing room, just after I had my first fitting for my wedding dress.

It was a lovely holiday and Hong Kong is really a lot of fun. There wasn't enough time to visit all the places I wanted to but its always nice to leave something for next time. :)

And in the meantime, I really should get back to my HAED!

My one eyed fairy

2009-05-25T18:41:00.000-07:00

After all the fanfare of our one year anniversary in the first week of May, it's been relatively quiet. We even missed the fortnightly update last week! Mainly because Eel went to Hong Kong for over a week, so she didn't have much chance to HAED. Now that *should* have meant that I'd do lots and lots, therefore increasing my lead by the thousands. However, what that means in reality, is that I took the opportunity to slacken off and not do that much either. :D

I've been able to quickly finish up my quota in slightly over an hour, as I'm working on the background area now, and then relax in front of the TV / play my DS without thinking about HAED. I skipped quite a few days here and there as well, secure in my knowledge that Eel wouldn't have been doing any! Wouldn't it be funny if it turns out that she secretly brought it to HK, and was busy HAEDing whilst I wasn't!

I've got a feeling that I won't be HAEDing so much in the future. BF has decided that he'll stop playing futsal for awhile, as his knees are hurting him. This means that he hangs around my house, and I'm obliged to accompany him in the living room. I don't like cross stitching in the living room, as it just doesn't feel right, perhaps it's the heat, or the chair isn't comfortable. For whatever reason, I never do as much downstairs as compared to upstairs. Oh oh...this spells trouble!

Happy Anniversary To Our Competition!

2009-05-01T20:23:00.000-07:00

It's hard to believe that a whole year has passed. I remember exactly one year ago, just before midnight on the 30th April, I had my cloth ready in my lap, needle was threaded and hand poised ready to strike! And at the stroke of midnight, BAM! Okay, well I'm sure it didn't quite sound like a BAM, but more like the, well, the non-noise of stitching.

Here's a slideshow of my progress pictures for the last year, for every single fortnight:

It's been quite a good week for me and I had the chance to take yesterday and tonight off. However, I better get back to it tomorrow! Here's my latest project picture:

From The 5 Year Cash Race

What has happened in this past year? Well, in terms of cross stitching, I have definitely gotten faster, neater and more systematic. I've gone from stitching in disciplined blocks, to ad-hoc stitches all over the page, and then back to more orderly blocks. Reading back through my posts for the last year, I've spent a lot of time watching TV! That's probably not going to change any time soon though. :)

Though there are many times when I look at my cloth and think "What the hell was I thinking??" I think this competition so far has been quite fun. Daily back and forth taunting between Sae and myself on MSN, Chen-Po trying to stop me from stitching just to annoy me, little goals set and accomplished, these are all the little joys that have seen me through the year.

Yesterday, I was having a bad day at work. I was feeling quite sick and there were many things going on at work that was annoying me. At lunch time, I put all that away and worked with Sae on getting the blog template ready and I remember feeling happy and content. It was just really nice remembering that there are other things in life to focus on if one part of your life is feeling pretty sucky.

So I think that in the past year I learnt, or rather reinforced within myself that its good to have interests, activities or projects that are outside of work. This has definitely helped keep me quite sane.

And of course an unexpected but very nice joy of this competition is getting to read all the supportive and encouraging comments from visitors. Thanks for visiting, everyone! Hope you'll continue to visit and share in the story of our long HAED journey!

Recap of our 1st HAED year

2009-04-29T20:37:00.000-07:00

We've made it to our first full HAED year! It's so hard to believe, it really doesn't feel like one year yet, time has just WOOSHED right by. In honour of our anniversary, we've updated all our information on the right side bar, as well as set up a new template! We weren't sure what template to use at first, but then we found out that the 1st year anniversary is paper, so we found a paper-themed template. So, if by chance you're following us via an RSS feed, do pop by and check out our new look. Eel and I have also created an individual slideshow of our progress pictures from update 1, till now, so sit back and enjoy the show below.

In the past year, I've graduated to stitching my HAED by hand to using Q-snaps. I learned about terms like tent stitching, parking and confetti stitches. I used fabric higher than 14ct for the first time in my life! So, all in all, a pretty good year stitching-wise.

During that one year, I also went on a lot of holidays (thanks in part to Air Asia!). I visited Boracay, Bali and Egypt! So, yes, a very good year traveling-wise as well! :D

I don't have a full blown picture of my HAED, as I don't want to take it off the Q-snaps until I'm done with the page I'm currently working on, but I took one a couple of weeks ago. Here's what it looked like when I first started, compared to two weeks ago.

And this is my progress on the section I'm working on.

So, we've posted early this time to make it in time for our 1st year anniversary. This means that it's also Labour Day and a public holiday for me, yay! I'm heading out for breakfast with friends, so I hoped you all enjoyed our changes!

A New Counting System

2009-04-21T18:58:00.000-07:00

I usually don't count how much I've done, I just normally go with approximations. But this time around, I decided I should be more systematic and count as I go. I think Sae uses an excel sheet on her laptop. I don't like having to reach from the back of my couch to my laptop on the coffee table though. I'm pretty lazy like that, sometimes I'll prepare yummy snacks and drinks for myself on the coffee table and then Chen-Po ends up eating it all up cos I'm too lazy to reach for it.

So instead I got a spreadsheet app for my iPhone so that I could just chuck my iphone on the couch with me. Its a free app called iSpreadsheet. Not the best spreadsheet app, but I'm not doing any hardcore spreadsheeting (?) anyway. Just somewhere to put in numbers, get a daily total, add it to a list of daily totals and get a final total figure.

Its been really helpful to make sure I reach my daily quota, and if not, to make sure that any excesses I've done through the week can make up for it. I'm averaging about 1k a week and I've managed to have 2 HAED-free days last week. So I'm pretty happy. I know Sae is zooming way ahead of me but I don't think I'll burn myself out with HAED just yet, we still have another 3.5 years after all.

Anyway, I started a new page, here's my progress so far:

From The 5 Year Cash Race

Hmm, I also have to spend some time thinking what special things we can do to our blog to celebrate our 1 year anniversary of HAED-ing.

Sometimes I total up my count and the number of stitches done is just so impressive and I think I've really worked hard for 1 year! But then I take a look at the rest of the cloth that's still unstitched and it brings me back to reality. :p

More background, with a little wing

2009-04-20T19:30:00.000-07:00

My pictures aren't going to be very interesting from now on, I've moved past the face, and am mostly working on the background, with a little wing thrown in. I've been consistently doing over 1000 a week, which is not too shabby, considering my weekly quota is 910. So, if I keep it up at this rate, I'll either be able to finish early, or more likely, relax when I go for my next holiday (which will be Eel's wedding in August).

I've been considering starting on a different page, and working on two at the same time. This page has been going pretty quickly because of the background, but as I look at the design further down, it looks like there's going to be a lot of colour switching coming up, so maybe I should just do it simultaneously? I'm not sure though, that would mean moving my fabric around on the Q-snaps quite a bit, and I don't have the patience for that.

One of the shows I've been watching lately is The Mentalist. The main character, Patrick Jane, works as a consultant with the California Bureau of Investigation. He used to work as a psychic who also helped out the police. One day, he was being interviewed by a TV show, and he claimed boastfully that he would be able to track down a killer. What happened next was the killer came after his family and murdered his wife and kid. So, now he is a consultant, and makes use of his amazing mental capabilities to help close murder cases.

The main actor is pretty funny in the show, he has the ability to look at people and know whether they're lying or not by their facial expressions. In the last episode I watched, he knew that this lady was hiding something in her apartment, but it was too messy for him to search through. So, he held her wrist and walked around the room. He could pinpoint exactly what the object was because her heartbeat got faster as he walked closer to it!

That's about it for me for this update, expect bigger things to come soon! Eel and I have a surprise planned for this blog. :)

A Fast Page but a Slow Weekend

2009-04-06T05:51:00.000-07:00

So I finished my page Yeay! Pretty ahead of schedule too. But I haven't been as organised this time around and so I forgot to print out a new page and also my highlighter ran out. So I didn't end up doing any HAED this weekend. But it was relaxing nonetheless. :)

Here's my pic:

So what did I do instead? On Saturday, we went to Joe Black for Chen-Po's second fitting for his suit. To read about his first visit, read all about it on my blog. This second time I took some photos. However I felt a bit self-conscious taking photos while the tailors were doing their pinning so I missed out on a good photo opportunity and Chen-Po is still rubbing that in my face. :p However I did get some photos of him in his suit:

Looks good hey? :) There's still a little bit more things to alter on it. But it should be done this weekend.

On Sunday was the Run for the Kids event to raise money for the Children's Hospital. I injured my knee a while ago and have to stay off it for a couple more weeks so I couldn't participate. So while waiting for Chen-Po to finish his run, I decided to walk around and take photos. Here's one of the crowd at the start of the race:

Not the most exciting weekend, but still very fun and relaxing. :)

Updates, and a rainy F1 race

2009-04-05T19:25:00.000-07:00

On Sunday, I took some time out of my busy HAED schedule (haha, yeah right, I didn't even do any on Saturday!), and went to my colleague's house for tea. He had baked scones, and invited us all over to eat them. They were truly yummy, warm from the oven with cream and strawberries and jam. Yumm!

The TV was on in the background so that we could catch the F1 race, which was in Malaysia. I've been a Ferrari supporter for years, mainly due to Michael Schumacher, but now, I'm indifferent. I just know that I'd prefer any team other than McLaren to win! Anyway, we were all hoping for rain, because rain makes it more interesting. But you'd better be careful what you wish for...

Halfway through the race, it started raining, and we were all happy. BUT...it turned out into a "torrential downpour" according to the newspapers today.

That's Jenson Button in front, look at how bad visibility was! Anyway, I hoped that it wouldn't rain too heavily, otherwise the race would be suspended, and what do you know...a few laps later, the race was stopped. They were waiting until the rain got lighter to resume the race, but one hour later, the rain was lighter, but the sky was getting darker! And that was the end of the Malaysian F1 Grand Prix race, over after 30 laps or so. Apparently it was the first time since the early 90s that a race was stopped due to rain.

Well, that's what the Formula One committee gets, for wanting to postpone the race till later so that the Europeans can watch it. They should know that it's monsoon season, and bound to rain that heavily in the evenings. The race used to be at 3pm local time, but got pushed back to 5pm for this reason. And just look what happened. :D

Stitching-wise, it's been a good week for me. Although perhaps not as good as some people would think, it's good to me! I've been reading this other HAED blog for inspiration. Some of them can do hundreds of stitches in one night, and over a thousand during the weekend! For me, 200 would be considered a lot in one night. Haha, after reaching a certain number, I just want to put my HAED down and read a book, or play PS2. So, here's my progress thus far.

I think I "should" be able to finish this page by the end of the week, otherwise it'll definitely be done by the next update. Wish me luck! All those fiddly stitches around the wings are really killing me....

Finally, a nice page :)

2009-03-24T07:09:00.000-07:00

This new page is by far my favourite I think, its going by really fast. Which is something I really, really needed. Its all nice and clumpy and its just flowing naturally. I hope my next few pages will be like that too! Sae's literally thousands ahead of me now and though I have 3 years to catch up, I definitely don't want to fall too far behind.

Time is really whizzing by fast isn't it? In one month, we celebrate our 1st year anniversary of this HAED competition. I wonder if we've really done about 1 year's worth or whether we're both behind.

On the money side, our accounts are starting to look quite nice and big. Its very tempting to take it out and go buy something nice ;). But of course I won't do that...though I wouldn't mind some new shoes...or books...or games. Sae's account must look even more tempting since its in Malaysian dollars.

I'll update the progress chart soon too, I want to get around to counting my progress properly. I've discovered a HUGE mistake in my previous count! For my full pages, I forgot to minus the bottom 3 rows and left-most 3 columns because I would have done them as part of the previous page. So I've actually been thinking that I've done more than I actually have. Its really depressing to find that out! Especially with Sae being all motivated and zooming along so fast. :'(

Sae, I think you need a HAED break :)

A Rainy Morning

2009-03-23T19:03:00.000-07:00

It was raining when I woke up this morning, and I felt so tempted to snuggle up in my bed and go back to bed. However, I knew I should get up so that I could take a progress picture of my HAED for the fortnightly update, so I dragged myself out of bed.

It looks almost the same as my last picture update! Not sure why, when I've done over 2000 stitches since then. Even though most of that was background, it still should look quite different, shouldn't it? My next page looks pretty bad, which is why I've been alternating between my previous page and this new one. *sigh* I don't feel like doing this new page at all!

Hopefully what will spur me onwards is the fact that I've finally gotten my new Dell monitor, hooray! I unpacked it last night, but haven't gotten a proper picture of it yet. What I have is this:

That's 1920 x 1080, woohooo!! I was enjoying myself last night watching programs on the monitor, specifically Dexter. To quote BF (if you've ever watched Dexter), "That mosquito is HUGE!" Hahaha....

New Page, New Camera, New Photo Albums

2009-03-10T08:03:00.000-07:00

I finally finished my stupid annoying page! Yeay! My resolution for my next page is to keep it blocky, just do a couple of blocks til they're done, instead of moving all over the page. Hopefully I can keep to that, but its always so tempting to just leave the single stitches behind and move to a nice big clump. Well here's my progress so far:

This photos was taken with Chen-Po's new Nikon D60, maybe its on some weird setting cos the colour is so off. Looks more maroon than purple. Speaking of photos, instead of HAED-ing, I've been sorting through my photos and setting up my Picasa Web Albums. Its really fun looking through old photos (well, 2 years old, so not really that old I guess) and tweaking them up. Its no where near done but check out my photo albums. :) Heaps more to come soon.

I'm going to try and follow Sae's footsteps of waking up early to HAED. But then again, I've been trying forever to wake up earlier than I need to and still I rarely get to work on time. Sleeping in is just too nice. :)

The early bird catches the worm....

2009-03-09T21:24:00.000-07:00

for today, anyway. I woke up at 8 this morning, plenty of time to do things before I needed to leave for work. So, I took out my camera, and snapped a picture of my HAED for our two-weekly progress update.

As you can see, there's been a lot more activity around the wing area, and the parts next to her face. I'm actually working on the background right at the top, but because that's a nice blocky area, I'm trying to even it out with the horrible number of one stitches that are coming up in the next page. Most of the wing outlines and the leafy bits are one - three stitches only, and that takes up heaps of time. So, instead of sailing through this page and then suffering later, I'm hoping that my tactic will work out for me later.

Whilst HAED-ing, I normally watch stuff on my laptop. One of the newer shows I've been watching is a UK mini-series called Lost In Austen. I read some reviews on several blogs, and they all seemed to really enjoy it, so I decided to give it a try.

The main character, Amanda Price, is a girl who really loves Pride & Prejudice. One day, after reading the book, she hears some noise in her bathroom, and discovers Elizabeth Bennett there! Apparently there's a secret door that leads from the Bennett's house to her bathroom. She opens the door to investigate, and she ends up in the Bennett's house, with no way to get back to her own house. So, she starts living out the book (she lands up in the beginning, with the news that Mr. Bingley and Mr. Darcy have just arrived in the area) as Elizabeth's friend from out of town.

The story line is quite interesting, seeing how they manage to twist the original. For example, instead of being attracted to Jane, Mr. Bingley singles Amanda out! She tries to stick to the book as much as possible, by telling him that she's attracted to females, not males. :D Also, Mr Collins likes Jane, but Amanda interrupts them, and somehow finds herself engaged to him.

It's definitely engaging, but I wouldn't say that I love it. I'm a huge fan of the BBC version of Pride & Prejudice, I don't like the recent version with Keira Knightly. I've probably watched it at least 5 times, and there will be more to come. That being the case, it's a bit difficult for me to watch this new movie, where it's similar...but different. Give me Mr Darcy aka Colin Firth any day! :D

Alas, My Lead is Gone. :(

2009-02-25T05:03:00.000-08:00

I've been very lazy about updating the chart, mostly because it seems like it will cement the fact that Sae has overtaken me. But ah well, time to face the truth. :'(

These days, it seems so hard to even get to my daily quota. I just really hate this page! It just seems like a very slow page, even though its not terribly full of single stitches.

Well, here's my progress pic:

There's been several things that's been taking my attention away from HAED lately. Firstly and most excitingly, I'll be getting married in August! :) Chenpo and I have laid down some plans and have begun on executing some of them. We're not having a big grand do, just something small and simple. But even so, there's still so many things to plan.

Secondly, in order to get some things that I'll need for the wedding, I'll be going to Hong Kong in May. I'll be going with another mutual friend of ours and will be visiting yet another mutual friend who works in HK. I can't wait! I love big cities and Hong Kong was always one of the top on my list of must-visit big cities.

Thirdly, I just got my copy of Street Fighter IV for the PS3. I'm not such a big fan, I didn't really grow up playing it much, just occasional bouts at the arcades every now and then. However, fighting games are always good fun and this one looks mighty fine. I haven't really played it much yet, but I like one character called El Fuerto. Mainly because in his intro sequence, he's carrying a frying pan and doing all these fancy flips while yelling out "Super Dynamic Cooking Time!" I wish he could use the frying pan when he's fighting though.

Well, I best not let Sae get too far ahead of me! Back to trying to catch up to Sae.

Goodbye, fairy!

2009-02-24T17:40:00.000-08:00

I've finally moved on to the next page, so you'll be seeing less and less of my fairy's face as I move across the row. Odds are, it'll still take a long time until her face is completely gone, as I do two pages vertically before moving on. Right now, I'm mostly working on the background at the top, interspersed with some of the single stitches at the wing section, so I won't feel completely overwhelmed later on.

One of the things that is spurring me onwards is the fact that our progress chart on the right sidebar has finally been updated! And guess who is in the lead now? :D By quite a healthy margin too, I might add. I still need to do a lot more before I "get even", as my pattern is quite a bit bigger, but a lead is better than nothing. It seems like Eel hasn't been doing too much lately, so it's giving me an even bigger lead. Go, me!!

I've been feeling extremely poor in the last couple of weeks, my credit card bill is HUGE and my bank balance is tiny. If only it was the other way round...Well, part of that is due to the fact that I've purchased airline tickets to Melbourne for Eel's wedding in August, and Mr. T is yet to pay me back for his. And since we'll be there anyway, we might as well take a side trip to New Zealand, I've already been to most of Australia. So, there goes more money. And what do I do? I go out and buy more stuff, most specifically, this:

A 24" Dell monitor! *sigh* Yes, I should be saving money, but it was just too tempting an offer to pass up. The price just dropped recently by RM300, and I was offered a subsidy of RM400, so I only ended up paying RM299 for it. Isn't that a great bargain?

Anyway, from now on, I must save if I want to do lots of activities in New Zealand. I've been Googling activities to do there, and glacier trekking looks extremely awesome, and is definitely top of my list at the moment! Mental note: Save, save, save...

Holidays are over :(

2009-02-11T02:24:00.000-08:00

I've had a lovely 3 weeks in Malaysia but now I'm back in Melbourne. Time to go back to work and time to settle down to do my HAED. Despite my best intentions, I probably didn't do more than 100 stitches while in Malaysia, my days were just filled with outings and family and friends. Which was really fun, but bad in terms of trying to keep up with Sae!

Since I have so few updates on HAED, I'll blog about my holiday instead. I spent 4 days in Penang (which is one place I love the most in the whole world), 2 days in Melaka and the rest at home in PJ. It was Chinese New Year and all my siblings came to PJ and so we had the whole family together. Here's a pic of the whole lot of us:

Some notable adventures that Chenpo and I embarked on were the Penang Heritage Trail walk, which took us from 9am til 3pm and we got pretty sunburnt from the hot Penang sun. We also walked to the top of the very steep Penang Hill road. That took 1 hour 40 minutes and left my legs absolutely useless the next day.

We also went for this SkyTrex Adventure thingy, which were these series of challenges set up 17m high in the jungle canopy of Bukit Cahaya. That was good fun, and especially entertaining when one of my friends got stuck in the middle of a flying fox challenge and had to be rescued.

My friends and I had out annual BBQ and this year we did a new thing which was a photo shoot. Here's one of my favourite pics from that shoot:

I'll be posting more photos of my trip on my other blog, so please visit :)

But now, my holiday is done and today I finally picked up some HAED again. I'm pretty sure I cleared my daily quota today, but I still have to pick up on my last 3 weeks of non-HAEDing. *sigh*. Here's what my piece looks like so far:

Probably can't notice anything new from the last update huh? I really better speed up!

Back to the daily grind

2009-02-10T21:34:00.000-08:00

I've settled down more or less since coming back from Egypt, and back to the daily working life. It didn't help that Chinese New Year was one week after we came back, and we got another few days of holiday. Then there was Thaipusam (I just love staying in Malaysia, we get tons of holidays!).

You would think that with all these holidays, my needle would be flying, and I'd be completing lots of my HAED. Well, think again. Since January, my HAED progress has been more like complete my daily quota as quickly as possible, then rush downstairs to play Persona 4! I've been averaging about at least an hour on my PS2 most nights, imagine how much of my HAED would be completed if I used that for stitching instead. Instead, here's how much I've completed.

I've got maybe about 150 stitches (mostly single ones!) left on my page, and then I'm done. In the meantime, I've branched to other pages, the single stitches were getting to me. That's why her neck is elongated, it's a nice part to stitch which is all one colour.

While Eel was here, we did a couple of not-normal activities. Normally when we meet up, all we do is eat, chat, or perhaps go for a movie. This time, we went Skytrekking! There's a place in the Bukit Cahaya park in Shah Alam called Skytrex. Basically they have an obstacle course 17 meters above the ground. You're hooked up to carabiners and pulleys, and you have to make your way through the course, going through flying foxes and jumping from plank to plank, and swinging from ropes. It was...fun? During the course I kept wondering why I was putting myself through such torture, as I'm not a big fan of heights. But looking back, it seems fun now that it's done.

The other thing that we did was to have a photo shoot with a bunch of our friends. We've all known each other since we were about 12, some even before that! We thought it'd be a nice thing to have some great photos of us, so that we can look back to this time when we're all young and beautiful. ;) I must say, I don't know how models do it, my smile felt so stiff a lot of the time, especially when the photographer was trying to get the settings right. In the end, we did end up with some pretty good pictures, especially one where we were trying to reproduce a "FRIENDS" tv show picture. Heheh, good memories...

Gong Xi Fa Chai!

2009-01-27T01:26:00.000-08:00

sAe: It's Chinese New Year, and that means that for the first time ever, we'll be doing a joint update. Eel's back from Melbourne, and today she came over to my house and we took a picture of our HAED's together! Mine isn't that different from the last time, because I've been away in Egypt. Luckily Eel's been back in Malaysia and she hasn't been doing too much of hers either, so hopefully it's not too big a gap between the two of us. To liven up the blog, I'll post up a couple of pictures we took in Egypt.

The first is a typical touristy shot, that lots of people like to do. That's my friend on the left, and me on the right. We almost got conned there, the taxi driver wanted to drop us off at the alternate entrance, where we would have to pay for a camel / horse ride just to take us to the pyramids! Luckily we were warned by other backpackers that this might happen, so we insisted that he took us to the proper entrance.

We detoured from Cairo to go to the White Desert, which is 5 hours away by bus, but it was really worth it. It proved to be one of the most memorable parts of the whole trip! We actually stayed overnight in the desert, under the stars, and it was freezing! The temperature dropped to 0 degrees Celcius that night, and we were all huddled under the blankets that they provided, praying for the sun to rise so that it wouldn't be so cold anymore. OK, enough about my stories, this blog isn't about me, but about our stitching! So, here we go with our updates...

sAe: Remarkably, in this picture, we look like we're not dressed at all! Note: We are! It so happened that we were wearing clothes that ended above the knee. :D Mine looks much smaller than Eel's but that's because my cloth count is higher than hers. I don't think that our amount completed is that far off from each other.

EeL: I've been cut off from civilisation, hence needing to use Sae's internet. Its nice that my work looks so much bigger than Sae's but I know its just fake 'bigness'. *Sigh* I really haven't done much HAED at all. Its quite hard to get any done here, mainly because there are 4 kids running around my house these days. I'm so paranoid that my nephews and nieces will mess it up or cut it up or puke on it or anything if they get their hands on it.

I'll do a proper graph and monetary update when I get back to Australia and work. Its quite peaceful not having internet access. Expect some touristy looking photos in my next update!

To all who celebrate, Happy Chinese New Year!

Bye-Bye 2008!

2009-01-02T20:06:00.000-08:00

Well its 2009 now and yes Sae was right, I am late with my post because I haven't gotten around to my "Don't be so lazy" resolution.

The truth is despite being on leave for the past 10 days, I really haven't done as much as I should have been. I really better make use of the time Sae's on holiday so I won't get left behind when she returns.

I've started a new page and finally finished the one single stitch that I had left about 3 pages ago. I still have 2 pages with about 4 stitches left on them. So far, this new page has been quite nice and easy but I still have to actually make time to do it :p.

Here's my progress:

I have 2 weeks to try to get as much as I can done while Sae's on holiday and then voila! I'm on holiday too :D. But I'll be able to take my HAED with me on my holiday because I'll be going home to Malaysia for 3 weeks. Sae and I will be able to view each other's HAED in real life for the first time since we started on this. We'll have to take photos comparing them side by side, so I better work hard to get more accomplished by then!

That one pic above took long enough to upload because right now I'm at the State Library and the network here is slow! I didn't think there'd be this many people at the library during the holiday season, but it looks like most of them are here watching youtube or facebooking. How scholarly ;). So I think I'll give blogging about a TV show a miss this week.

I'd like to wish everyone a belated but still very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! Thank you for visiting us, it really is very encouraging reading the comments. Please visit us lots in 2009 too! And wish me luck for beating Sae, though there's still about 4 years to go...*sigh*

I can see clearly now....

2009-01-01T02:14:00.000-08:00

Or rather, my fairy can! I've completed one of her eyes, and she's looking much better now. It's crazy, just looking at her eye, there must be more than ten colours in that small section. I've taken a close-up of her eye, it's not that clear (darn you, macro shot!), but you'll get the general idea.

And here's the overview of the section I'm currently working on now.

Our updates are late this week, I suppose we were all busy with Christmas / New Year's celebrations. My excuse is that I'm intentionally late with my update. As I'm leaving for Egypt (in 6 hours!), I wanted to wait until the last minute to get as much done as possible. As for Eel, hmm, I don't know about her. I suppose she's being lazy! :)

There's going to be no news from me for awhile, I'll only be back in 2 1/2 weeks, and after that, it'll be awhile before my HAED looks any different from today!

Happy New Year to everyone who reads this blog, and to those of you that have left comments, thank you very much! It's tremendously encouraging to see that we do have some interested people out there who are following our competition.

See you at the end of the month!

Distractions, distractions...

2008-12-16T04:13:00.000-08:00

It appears we missed blogging last week, though it really doesn't feel like it. Time really does fly, especially when you're not doing much HAED. Like me...

I really have been slacking off lately, which is really bad timing as Sae is getting all fired up and doing more than her quota every day. Woe is me! Hurry up and go on holiday Sae.

Here's my progress pic, as you can see, not much difference since the last post :'(

Similar to Sae, one of the reasons why I haven't been doing as much HAED is because I'm trying to finish Lost Odyssey:

I have a really bad habit of never finishing up games. I'll start playing a game, get a fair way into it, and then start another game 'just to try it' and then never go back to that first game. Sometimes I do go back, multiple times even but I can probably count the number of games I've finished in one hand. For example, I started Kingdom Hearts, didn't finish it, went back to it about 2 or 3 years and forced myself to finish it because I really wanted to play the sequel. And now I've played heaps of the sequel but probably won't finish it til the next installment comes out.

But now in order to get me to finish some of the many games I have piled up, Chen-po's made me a rule that I can't buy or start another game until I finish my current game, Lost Odyssey. I'm about 40 hours into it and on the final disc (its got 4 discs) so I can feel the end is near! I would like to finish it before the end of the year.

But *sigh* I really do need to get back to more HAED-ing...

More gaming than HAED-ing

2008-12-15T18:33:00.000-08:00

This is my second-last post before I'm off to Egypt, I'm so excited, I can't wait! We've finalized most of our plans, except for what to do in Cairo. Since we're going to be in Cairo for quite a few days, we're taking it nice and easy there. The only downside to the trip is that I'm going to have 2 1/2 weeks of non-HAED-ing whatsoever, so I've been trying to do as much as possible in the mean time.

I'm almost done with my 6th page, a few more nights of stitching and I should be done. It's been a nice page, well, compared to the previous page, almost anything would be nice! And here's my progress up till this morning.

One of the things that have been keeping me from my HAED is Persona FES, a PS2 game. I'm not going into too much detail here, as I've already blogged about it on my other blog.

I've recently started playing it again, after a break of about a month, and I'm determined to finish it before I go to Egypt! Hahah, I don't even know how much more of the story line there is, I'm up to 50 hours of playtime so far.

The reason I'm trying to finish it soon, is because I want to start on some new games I just bought, which are Kingdom Hearts Re: Chain of Memories and Persona 4! Kingdom Hearts is a series which features characters from Disney as well as those from the Final Fantasy series, and it makes for really fun playing, I've played both Kingdom Hearts I and II, and will definitely be trying this game out next.

And as for Persona 4, how can you not play it after playing Persona FES? It's supposed to be even better, so expect me to spend a lot more time on my PS2 from now on.

Half A Page And Dexter

2008-11-26T04:19:00.000-08:00

Its my turn to be the one slacking off as Sae catches up with me. Fortunately, this page is a really nice page, so its going quite fast despite not spending as much time as I should be doing HAED.

Here's my progress pics, I'm about half way through my third full page.

One of the reasons why I've been slowing down is because I've started watching Dexter:
Everyone's been raving about Dexter for ages now but somehow their description about it never appealed to me. "Oh Dexter's this forensic investigator, he helps solve all these murders, but he's actually also a serial killer." I immediately started humming the CSI theme in my head. But, finally we started on Dexter and it's been a really pleasant surprise.

Dexter is indeed a forensic investigator with the Miami police dept and he is very good at what he does and he is also a serial killer. I was dreading that this would be a very 'serious' type of show but its actually really quite funny. Dexter grew up with this natural urges to kill people and his foster father trained him to only kill murderers and also how to hide his 'real' side from the outside world. As a result, he's a bit abnormal and has trouble knowing how to act normal.

I'm up to the second season right now. In the first season, the police dept are busy hunting down a serial killer codenamed the Ice Truck Killer. the Ice Truck Killer in turn is busy playing games with Dexter. In this second season, the focus is on Dexter as the bodies of his victims are discovered and the police dept has to hunt down the Bay Harbour Butcher and Dexter's trying to stay one step ahead.

For a show with a lot of killing and corpses, its not too squeemish. Its a fun show :).

My 6th page is done, hip hip hooray!

2008-11-23T21:50:00.000-08:00

When we first started this competition, we agreed on updates every two weeks. We started off on a Monday, so technically, we should be updating the blog every Monday. However, things being the way they are, we soon started updating the blog on Tuesdays. Then, it even got to the point that we were updating the blog on Wednesdays!

Today, I'm going to be a very good girl, and do my update on the original day that we're supposed to. I've been struggling over my current page because of all the confetti stitches, and I tried my best to complete it before this update, and I did! My stitching style was more of stitch blocks of the same colour, then do a few confetti stitches, and repeat. It was much less stressful than doing a lot of confetti stitches all at the same time, but it has resulted in quite a patchy look in the overall look.

I'm also not too sure about one of the colours in the fairy's forehead, it looks a bit strange, although I double checked the number. It could be because it was from an older skein, and the colour has somehow changed over the years? Hmm, I'll try to sew a bit with a new skein and hope that the colour is the same, and it just looks weird because it's a patch in the middle of nowhere. Here's what it looks like from far.

DBF's away in Sydney this week, so I foresee some good HAED times to come. Eel, you'd better watch out, I'm catching up!

Egypt preparations, and a bit of stitching

2008-11-10T18:23:00.000-08:00

I've been doing quite a lot of research online in preparation for my Egypt trip in January. I just realized that there are less than two months till I leave, and we haven't made any plans except for buying our flight tickets there.

Luckily I took the initiative, because apparently for the Nile cruise (from Aswan to Luxor), we need to book the rooms 45 days in advance! This is the boat called the MS Sherry that I'm hoping to go on, it's one of the cheapest ones, with quite good reviews. At the moment, the travel agent is checking whether there are cabins available. It only leaves once a week on Fridays, so we only have one date when we can go.

Another place that we want to go to is the White Desert. It's not one of the standard items offered on a tour, so it was only by chance that we got to know about it. It looks like a Christmas place in the desert, and we get to camp overnight in the desert with a barbeque dinner.

I'm starting to get really excited about this trip, it's going to be really fun, even though a big hole will be burnt in my pocket. We're trying to do as much as possible, because I don't think we'll go back to Egypt again, there's so many other places to go to.

HAED-wise, more confetti stitching. I'm now stitching on three pages simultaneously, one which has lots of confetti stitches, and two others because they have bigger areas which can save me from boredom.

It doesn't really look like there are that many colours involved, here's a closer picture of the fairy's head. Just look at her hair! Imagine, the most of the same colour is probably three to five stitches, so I need to keep on changing colours non-stop. I think the most time taken is probably flipping my Q-snaps back and forth to start / end the threads!

I'm hoping I'll have that page finished by the next update, but I have my doubts, there are just so many one stitches I can do, and so little time to do them in!

Two Pages of Single Stitches, a New Page and Some Dirty Sexy Money

2008-11-10T06:17:00.000-08:00

This past couple of weeks has really rushed by quite fast! I had a long weekend at the start of November as it was Melbourne Cup public holiday on the 4th Nov, so I took the Monday off as well. 4th was also my birthday so I was determined to have a lovely long birthday weekend. I didn't end up doing much HAED despite all that free time and I've really slacked off these past couple weeks. I think I've barely hit a 20 stitch daily average and I still haven't finished that damn page! Both of them!

I did however start on a new page because I was sick of single stitches, so its nice to swap from big clumps to single stitches. I'm going to attempt to fully finish off sections of the new page, instead of only focusing on all the big clumps.

Here's my progress pics:
Check out all the single stitches that I still have for 2 pages. Grrr....I guess mainly its sort of hard to focus on single stitches when I'm trying to watch TV at the same time. Seems to require way more concentration.

One series that I've been keeping up with while HAED-ing is Dirty Sexy Money:

When I first heard about this show and watched the ads for it, I wasn't interested at all. It sounded too soapy for me. My interest only came from reading some fashion mag (can't remember which one) where they quoted this series as something with lots of current trends and fashion labels. So I decided to check it out if only for the clothes. I was pleasantly surprised by it and now its one of my favourite series.

The main character is Nick George, who starts out as the good-guy lawyer, into charities and all that. His whole life, he's had to deal with growing up with the super rich Darling family, whom his dad worked for as their family lawyer. At the start of the series, his dad has just died in a suspicious plane crash and the Darlings offer Nick a position as their family lawyer in exchange for enough money to support the charities that he's passionate about. And so begins his slavery to the family, where as family lawyer, he seems to have to deal with all kinds of stupid little chores. At times it seems that he's being so easily manipulated by the family, other times you can tell he's got something up his sleeve.

The way this series is written is pretty good, most of the times its pretty funny and all other times, it makes you go "Ooooh, so that's what he was planning all along!" All the characters are very likeable. Even the rich spoilt brat kids, who in the ads I saw just seemed to be portrayed as your typical annoying rich brats. But they are actually very good characters, all of them seem to have a good side as well as an evil side. And its always a guess as to who is manipulating who.

My favourite character is Brian Darling, who is the illegitimate child of Letitia Darling and Nick's dad. He starts off the series as a minister at a church but he's the most rude, corrupted and bad tempered minister ever. He has an affair and gets a child and then to get custody of the child, he tries to bribe the jury!

Dirty Sexy Money is in its second season now. If you like Desperate Housewives, I think you'd love this. I used to like Desperate Housewives but I think this is better.

Another Page Almost Done, and Project Runway Canada

2008-10-29T05:18:00.000-07:00

I feel like I have missed many days of HAED, but despite that, I'm quite happy with this past fortnight. It seems like I have gotten quite a lot done and I'm nearly at the end of my second full page.

Now I no longer have big, big clumps but the remainder stitches aren't as bad as single stitches. So I theoretically should be able to get this page done by the end of this week. Here's my progress:

I've just finished watching the first season of Project Runway Canada.

I'm a huge Project Runway fan, I've seen all five seasons of the American Project Runway, as well as the first season of the Australian version. The Canadian version is a little bit different, especially in regards to how they edit it. I'm not too fond of the host, Iman. In some of the episodes where she doesn't agree with the opinion of the other judges, she just cuts them off and says "Well you're wrong!" Which is sorta silly as well as rude since its fashion, not maths.

They had some interesting challenges, the first episode had them choosing 3 pieces of clothes belonging to another designer and making an outfit out of it. Another challenge, they had to use old umbrellas. One challenge was to design outfits for a Bratz doll and the judge was saying that one of the designs had a slit that was too high, Bratz dolls can't be so revealing. I was a bit surprised at that, because Bratz dolls are so overly skanky! At least, the dress with the slit looks sort of classy, as well as sexy.

My favourite designer was Marie Genevieve, right from the first episode. She made a really cute dress, out of someone's bathrobe. It ended up looking really cool and expensive and not one bit like it was made of toweling material. She was one of the final 3 designers, but unfortunately she didn't win. I quite liked her collection, it was quite strong visually but the comments were that it wasn't cohesive as some of the clohtes seem for a younger audience and some were more sophisticated.

The winner was Biddell, who really is very talented. However I didn't like him because he won one challenge and it gave him such a big head! Also, he always acted misunderstood, just because he was the youngest. That really pissed me off, as it was like he was trying to stress how he's a rebel but I don't think the things he did was really that "out there" to warrant him making such a big fuss over it.

But overall, the series was quite good. Unlike the Australian series, the challenges were interesting and I thought the judging was pretty spot on. I hope they will have more seasons very soon. And I hope Marie Genevieve makes it as a big designer, as I really liked her designs and would definitely get her clothes.

Putting off the inevitable

2008-10-27T19:12:00.000-07:00

This week's update picture looks pretty good, compared to two weeks ago. You can see the hair, and the wing has got lots more filled in. Unfortunately, if you look really closely you can see lots of small holes all over, and those are all the one stitches that I've been putting off, because I want to catch up with Eel! I keep thinking that if I do the bigger clumps, I'll catch up quicker, but I know that will just be my downfall at the end. I actually have no idea how far behind I am, since we haven't done a total count for quite awhile. I guess we should do it this week, together with our bank balance update.

Over the weekend, I managed to watch Mamma Mia (finally!). The musical production is coming to Malaysia, and I really wanted to get tickets, but they sold out really quickly. One week after the tickets came out, I went to the box office to buy some tickets, and they were sold out, all shows and all prices! :( So, I had to content myself with the movie instead.

It's a really entertaining, fun movie, especially if you know the songs. Sophie, is getting married, and she doesn't know who her father is. She found her mother's diary, and discovered that her mum slept with three guys a few days apart, so any one of them could be her father. She invites all three guys to her wedding, as she's convinced that once she sees them, she will automatically know which one her dad is.

Two of the candidates are well-known, the main guy is played by Pierce Brosnan, who can't sing well, but looks so charming. I've always loved him, he cuts such a dashing figure! The other guy was Colin Firth, who I first got to know about from Pride & Prejudice (the BBC version). Although he played a very stiff, reserved kind of role in that movie, somehow he appeals to a lot of women. I remember my friends and I all drooling over him. There was one scene where he dives into the lake, and one of my friends loved that scene so much that she replayed it over and over again!

As I said, it was a really fun movie, but it was a bit sad that the people in the cinema didn't sing along to the lyrics. I felt a bit shy singing along, and it'd probably annoy the other people since they weren't singing themselves. It's definitely a show to watch if you like the ABBA songs.

Pulling Ahead... and Terminator

2008-10-14T05:00:00.000-07:00

As Sae slows down, I'm still chugging along. I think the main reason is because Sae enjoys other cross stitch projects, so she's conflicted between HAED and all the other patterns she wants to do. Myself, I have lots of things that I want to do but not other cross stitch patterns. So while I watch TV, I can't do all the other things I want to do anyway, so I have no problem getting on with HAED.

I'm onto a good page, quite a lot of big clumps so I'm happy and no longer depressed. Here's my progress:

As mentioned before, rather than all my posts sounding the same, ie "Chuggin' along, slowing down, staying ahead, etc", I'll blog about the TV shows that I watch while working on my HAED. Today's review is on Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.

This series follows events that occur in the timeline between the second and third Terminator movie. (Though I think there's some parallel universe, alternate reality thing, I'm not sure...) Sarah Connor and her son John have been hiding and running away from the Terminators sent from the future to kill John. John is very nearly killed by one but is saved by a young girl, who turns out to be a Terminator sent by the future John to save himself. John's had enough of running away and is determined to stop D-Day from happening. So now, Sarah, John and Cameron the ally Terminator are trying to trace the origins of SkyNet (the first computer that gained awareness) in order to destroy it. Joining them is another soldier from the future, John's uncle Derek Reese.

Sarah Connor Chronicles is now up to Season 2, with a very short first season due to the Writer's Strike in the US earlier this year. I really like this series, well obviously, else I wouldn't bother watching it. I've always liked all the Terminator movies, my favourite being Terminator 2. I watched the first movie when I was quite young, so I don't quite remember it. But the story is interesting. The only thing is, like all other time travel stories, you can't think too much about it, inevitably, there's tons of loopholes and confusion.

My favourite character is Cameron, the ally Terminator. She's meant to pretend to be John's sister but she has lots of trouble acting or understanding humans and she always says or does really funny things. And being a Terminator, she can annhiliate anyone and anything. There's parts in the show where her chip breaks and she turns against John, which makes it really interesting, cos you never know when she's going to flip out and annhiliate him.

So in conclusion, if you like action shows with tiny bits of sci-fi thrown in, Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles is a good one to try.

Not much HAED, but lots of Lizzie Kate!

2008-10-13T21:01:00.000-07:00

So, here's my bi-weekly progress update on my HAED. It looks almost the same, but the wing is a tad bit filled up compared to to the last time. I really haven't been doing much HAED lately, I've been finding other things to occupy my time.

I've been browsing quite a bit on Etsy for awhile, and I've seen some pretty cool cross stitch cards that have been made. So, I decided to turn my hand to making some cards. It's been a bit of a struggle to get cards, the shipping from overseas is really expensive, and over here in Malaysia, I've contacted a printer who makes printed greeting cards, but they say they cannot provide blank greeting cards. I have no idea why, to me, it seems like it'd be a benefit to them, selling blank cards to me at the same price as printed ones.

Anyway, I decided to go with fully handmade cards to see how well it turns out, so I bought a big piece of card, and got BF to cut and crease them (he's the neat one!). I don't have any fabric glue, so I tested out two methods last night with fragments of Aida and some leftover card, one was using double sided tape, and the other was using super glue. Well, the super glue didn't work too well, it soaked through the holes in the cloth, and stained it slightly. And I present to you my finished products (all Lizzie Kate designs).

Eel suggested that I put a border in to make the cards look a bit better. It's an interesting idea, but for now, it's stuck and completed, so maybe next time!

The garden is growing, but slowly

2008-09-30T20:16:00.001-07:00

Well, I said almost two weeks ago that I was going to complete my fifth page, and I only managed to complete it more than a week later. I blame the wreath, all those one stitches took ages longer than expected!

I finally completed it last Saturday, and immediately celebrated by doing no HAED whatsoever until today (Wednesday). And, to add to Eel's good news, I'll be going on holiday (yes, again!) to Singapore and will only be back this weekend.

We were doing some calculations the other day, as to where we were in regards to the competition. Originally, I was supposed to do 130 stitches a day, and she was supposed to do 125 a day. After some number punching, it turns out then I'm over 40 days ahead of our 4 1/2 year estimated completion date, woohoo!! Of course, she's something like 60+ days ahead of her schedule, so that means I'm way behind her, and only going to get worse this week.

Haha, well, as long as I'm happy, I guess that doesn't really matter. All I need to do is to make sure I complete it within our timeline! So, I still haven't packed yet, and I'm leaving for lunch in about an hour's time. Till the next update, bye!!

Finished My First Full Page...Almost

2008-09-29T07:04:00.001-07:00

I've sort of finished my first full page. All I have left are maybe 4-5 single stitches, which I can't be bothered doing just yet, because they're completely new colours that I haven't used before and its such a hassle looking up what they are and getting them out of my thread box.

I've started on the page above because I already had that printed out. Initially I was going to work according to rows. This page looks good though, nice and clumpy. So I might as well keep going and then go back to my second row of pages.

I need to come up with a solution to keep all the cloth below tucked in nicely. Maybe a clothes pin or something like that. At the moment, I'm just rolling it up and holding it with my left hand but its getting quite annoying. Not to mention very crumply!

Here's my progress:

I always stitch while watching TV and so because our regular updates are going to always sound the same, I thought I'd add reviews of the stuff I watch while I stitch. Lately, I've been catching up on Underbelly.
It's based on the Gangland Wars that happened in Melbourne from 1995-2004. The court cases are still on-going so for a while, this show was not allowed to be shown on Victorian TV. But now it's on TV, however some faces and names are still blurred out due to the ongoing court cases.

I find this series very interesting because the events it depicts happened in real-life and it happened around where I live. One of the murders took place in an Italian cafe just a couple of blocks away from my apartment. I didn't really follow the news at the time, so I'm not sure what exactly happened. So its good following this series to learn about the Gangland Wars. However, there are many familiar names that I did read about in the papers at the time. Apparently, all the characters in the series do look a bit like their real-life counterparts.

Underbelly has a good balance of humour mixed in, which I really like. There's the whole gritty underworld feel to it, but at the same time, the characters are very real. They bungle up and they do stupid things. I don't think I would enjoy it as much if it was just depicted as being serious all the time.

I'm beginning to lose track of who is who in it. Every episode has a murder or a few murders in it. I'm up to Episode 11 out of 13 and there's been more than 20 murders so far. So I'm starting to get confused, especially regarding who is on each side.

I definitely recommend this series. However if you get sick at the sight of blood and gunshot wounds, this might not be the series for you. Like I mentioned, maybe murders per episode. The most heart-wrenching is Jason Moran's as he was gunned down in broad daylight in his car, with his kids watching in the back seat. Through the whole brain splattering on window scene. However, it really is a good series.

In other news, its a new month and so we've updated the prize money contribution. I'll be updating the progress chart soon as well.

Oh, This Is Just Getting Depressing!

2008-09-16T22:55:00.000-07:00

I feel like I'm getting nowhere, I stitch and I stitch and I don't notice any changes by the end of the night. This page is super annoying me, which I guess does motivate me to keep at it so I can get it over with and move onto a nicer page.

Looking at my last progress picture is quite heartening though, as I really have done quite a lot. Too bad it just doesn't feel like that while I'm actually working on it.

Here's my new progress pics:
Look at all the holes of single stitches!

Look at that big, big cloth!

Here's the progress chart of our progress. As you can see, I'm trying my very best to stay ahead of Sae:

But the gap is closing! Oh no. :( How long can I keep this up?

Procrastination, thy name is HAED

2008-09-16T16:50:00.000-07:00

Over the past two weeks, I've known I should be doing a lot more HAED to catch up to Eel. However, something always seems to happen to take my interest of HAED, which has resulted in some really slow progress. This seems to be about the slowest I've ever been in terms of HAED stitching! I keep telling myself Eel's probably not doing too much either, to make myself feel better.

Anyway, it's 7.45am right now, I've woken up early because it's a holiday in Malaysia today. Somehow I have this trait to wake up early on holidays / weekends. It's as if my brain is telling me not to miss a single minute of free time. I'm determined to do lots of HAED today, especially since BF is working (he's based in a different state). So, less blogging, more stitching time!

Back from Bali, with little stitching to show

2008-09-01T20:53:00.000-07:00

A lot of my recent posts seem to be about coming back from a holiday! Haha, I've been back from Bali for about a week, and ever since coming back, I've been remarkable un-inspired to work on my HAED. Instead, I've been working on a Waxing moon design (which I completed on Saturday), and you can see a picture of it on my other blog.

I have picked up my HAED now and again, but more to keep the gap of 1.5k more or less constant, rather than doing it for the fun of it. So, there's really not too much to say about it! I know I said I'd take it out of the Q-snaps every two weeks to get a good photo, but guess what? I'm just too lazy to do it. :D

As for Bali, I don't have a lot of pictures compared to Boracay. Bali turned out to be mainly a shopping trip, but here are a couple of pictures I have.

This is the villa we stayed at, it was a 4 room villa with a living room & kitchen, and a personal pool.

The shrine that was built to commemorate the people that were killed during the Sari club bombing. It lists down all the people and the countries that they came from.

Well, that's all folks! Hopefully I'll have a lot more stitching updates in two weeks time.

Fitting HAED Into My Life

2008-09-01T18:56:00.000-07:00

So I'm onto my first full page now. And it is tough! I feel like I really haven't made much progress at all, and this page also has lots of single stitches in between small clumps. I've also slowed down a lot cos there's lots of cloth hanging below the area I'm stitching. Its not such a big problem as yet but I should probably start investigating methods of keeping all the extra cloth out of the way.

I tried to widen my gap with Sae on holiday last week, but at the same time I've been busy with various other hobbies and activities. Its tempting to spend hours and hours to ensure that I'm comfortably ahead of Sae, but I don't like the idea of putting of all the other things that I wanna get done til this competition is over. So I'm trying to juggle HAED, going to the gym, my side project, as well as trying to catch up with playing my new games. Not to mention house chores and trying to cook more. I'm blaming it on work, imagine all I could get accomplished if I didn't have to go to work. Time to win that lotto...oh maybe time to buy a lotto so I can actually win it...

Well back to HAED updates, here's my progress pics so far:

I've updated the prize money contribution totals as well. Due to the fluctuating exchange rates lately, we're well under the USD200 total that we're meant to be at this moment. I'll update the progress chart after this as well. So far, I'm at about 1.5k stitches ahead of Sae.

A friend of ours will be visiting me this weekend, so I should try to do heaps of HAED this next few days so I don't fall too far behind while hanging out with her.

If only my page was just the one colour!

On To My Second Row of Pages

2008-08-19T04:52:00.000-07:00

I've finally finished with one row of pages, so the bottomest bit of the pattern is done. From now on, I'll be working on full pages, whereas so far I've only worked on pages that are about 2/3 full of stitches. I've marked the area of my first full page on my cloth and wow its immensely huge! I feel like one page is going to take forever.

Last week, I was extremely slow, skipping entire days and only doing 100 or less on other days. I really do have to ramp up my effort if I wanna keep this lead!

Here's my work so far:

I think its turning out quite nicely, it definitely looks nicer through a photo than up close!

The bottom row of pages totalled up to 21200 stitches. I reckon so far I've done approximately 21.5k for the whole thing.

Sae goes on holiday this weekend so this is my chance! Wish me luck!

No more confetti stitches, please!

2008-08-18T18:31:00.000-07:00

It's been an immensely tough week for my HAED. I thought that it was tough when I reached the wreath section of my design, and boy, was I wrong. I've now reached the hair and wings part of the fairy, and that's so much worse! The outline of the hair / wings are practically ALL confetti stitches.

I was attempting to finish my 4th page last week, and towards the weekend, I only had about 150 stitches to go. It took at least 5 - 6 hours to finish up those sections! Why, oh why, did I choose such a colourful design? I got so discouraged that I stopped HAEDing for awhile, and checked out Eel's design to see when her confetti stitches would start. All that did was to make me even more discouraged. She's got practically whole pages with just one colour! *sigh*

Since I had to move my cloth yet again for my 5th page, I spread it out yesterday night, ironed it and took a picture from afar. And, I think that my work has paid off somewhat. It looks really pretty, so much better than from up close.

And here's what it looks like from near, the picture's a bit crooked, but you get the idea...

Slow and Steady Not Looking So Good Now!

2008-08-04T23:10:00.000-07:00

While I've been fairly consistent over the past month or so, Sae has been slowing down and speeding up sporadically. Right now, she's on a steep climb and is quickly catching up to me. Which is scary because I worked so hard to get that lead and she is going to blow my lead to smithereens in a couple of weeks.

Here's a trend graph of our work since we've started:
So much like the tortoise and the hare, the hare took a nap a couple of weeks ago and has now woken up and is speeding up to the tortoise really fast. Too fast!

Sae's insisting that its taking her so long to catch up. But to me, its happening too quickly! Hurry up and go on your holiday Sae!

Here's my pic of my progress so far. This time around, I decided to take a photo of the entire cloth, and Wow, there's so much left to do!

Tonight I'll be doing that 1 hour of big colour clump test to see how fast I stitch in comparison to Sae. I predict that I'm no way near 135. Well, we'll see..

The big move

2008-08-04T18:44:00.000-07:00

After 3 months of stitching in the same spot, I've finally come to the time when I can move the fabric on the Q-snaps. It isn't a big move, but any move is better than none. For the past two weeks, my stitching has felt very much like catch up time, in order to lessen the gap between Eel and I. The unfortunate thing is, just as I catch up slightly, I'm probably going to be off on my next holiday (I'm going to Bali in two weeks).

It's been a pretty busy week, a friend came down from Melbourne for work, and I've been taking him around, mainly out to eat, so not as much HAED time as I would like. The upcoming two weeks are going to be chaos as well, we've just gotten two new projects for work, and the deadlines are in two weeks for both of them!

Yesterday, Eel and I were discussing our HAED. She's thinks that I stitch much faster than she does, whereas I said that perhaps I stitch more than she does, which is why I've been able to lessen the gap from 3k to about 2k. We agreed to stitch big blocks, and we would time ourselves to one hour, and then count how many stitches we completed. Of course, stuff just had to go wrong, my threads kept knotting up and I had to flip my cloth constantly to untangle it. Anyway, I got up to about 135 stitches in an hour. Of course, this is for big patches of the same colour, and not the one stitch ones!

So, here's my progress, the darker patch of gray is the part I did last night for the one hour test.

Did you know...

2008-07-21T18:37:00.000-07:00

that some laptops have SD card readers? Meaning that you don't need to get your camera cable out from wherever you keep it, and can just take the card and plug it into the slot in your laptop? I didn't!! Until just a few days ago. I tried it out this morning and it was soo much easier compared to using the cable. I'm never using the cable again! Perhaps this will inspire me to take more pictures of my stitching. :D

It's only been a week since my last post, due to my holiday, so don't expect too much improvement. I decided to do some of the one-stitch sections, mainly so that I wouldn't get frustrated later on when there are tons of one stitches all over, and also because the one stitch section is the part with the wreath, so it looks like I've done a lot more than I actually have!

It's probably even harder for me to estimate how many stitches I've completed. At the moment, I've got stitches on 3 different pages simultaneously! I try and keep to the 10x10 squares as much as possible, but if there are any stitches of the same colour nearby, I'll do those as well. So it's all a bit haphazard at the moment, but I think I've done about 14.4k.

Big Colour Clumps To The Rescue!

2008-07-21T05:32:00.000-07:00

I've started a new page, my second last in the bottomest row of my pattern. I've been feeling quite excited that I'm coming to the end of the row. I estimate in about 1 month, I'll be able to move onto the next row of pages. When that happens, I'll be stitching full pages so each page will take me ages. It'll be quite a big change and I'll have to see if that changes my stitching habits.

In this past 2 weeks, I've managed to do quite a lot of stitching. Mainly because these past few columns have been big clumps of the same colours. I love big, big colour clumps, makes it much easier for me to stitch and watch TV at the same time.

Here's a photo of my current progress:

Its a bit hard to count accurately, but I'd say I'm about up to 17k stitches. I'm still ahead of Sae, but I can't let my guard down! She's back and reinvigorated to take me down!

Back from my holiday!

2008-07-13T19:28:00.000-07:00

I came back from my holiday last Wednesday, and it surely was a good holiday! Boracay island, which is about an hour's flight away from Manila, is considered one of the best tropical beaches around. Since I don't have too many stitching photos, let me entertain you by showing a couple of holiday photos instead!

This is the view from our hotel room. We had breakfast at the little huts every day, the view was spectacular!

And this is the beach near our hotel, which is somewhere up the cliff. That's me in the center. :D It was a very relaxing holiday, we did nothing much except laze around the beach and eat. I feel like I've gained tons of weight just from that holiday!

As for stitching updates, I had grand plans to do lots during the weekend. But there's some saying...about grand plans gone awry? On Friday night, I suddenly got a sore throat. It's strange how that happened, there was no hint of me falling sick, just BOOM, and I had a sore throat. The next morning, I had a fever as well. I probably SHOULD have stayed in bed and rested, but one of my friends was down from Singapore. I ended up going out for brunch with her and then we hung around my house, talking and watching TV. So, there went my stitching plans for the weekend.

Here's my tiny update since the last time, it looks almost the same! I've been working on the background on the left side, it's grown bigger by a bit.

Widening the Gap

2008-07-07T05:08:00.000-07:00

This week, I hope to gain a much bigger lead on Sae, seeing that she's on holiday. If all goes according to plan and she didn't bring her HAED along with her, I should be ahead of her by about 3k stitches.

Lately, I've started watching Stargate Atlantis starting from Season 1 and that's greatly impacted on my stitching speed. However, with my 3k lead, I think I can keep this up. :D

This week, I'm up to about 14400 stitches and am back to going by columns on my page. Here's a pic of my progress:

It seems like I've done so much but then I'm only on my bottomest row. And whenever I remember that, it seems like many long years of stitching stretches ahead of me.

Ah well, at least I'm ahead of Sae! ;)

Stats and Charts

2008-06-29T19:18:00.000-07:00

As promised, here's a graph charting our progress since the start of the competition.

Looks like my progress has been a bit more erratic than Sae's, whereas Sae's graph is a much smoother looking line. However, I'm slowly widening the lead that I have and intend to keep that up as Sae's line goes down and down. :p

I'll also be updating the progress chart on the sideframe, which brings me and Sae's stitch count to 13.25k and 11.6k respectively.

We're at the end of our second month in this competition and after a strong start from both of us, it does look like we will finish much earlier than our deadline. If we keep up this pace, that is.

Slow Progress, An Annoying Page

2008-06-24T07:55:00.000-07:00

I'm finding this page really tough, the major big chunks of colour are of a colour that I've run out of in my "WIP Box". I have 2 big boxes of threads where I've stored all the threads that Sae bought for me, divided by the DMC codes. I have another smaller box, where I put several colours that I'm working on for that page. And now, one of the colours in my WIP box has finished and I need to get a new skein out of the big boxes. Which isn't terribly difficult, except I'm so lazy that I can't make the trip to the other side of the coffee table where it lives. :p.

So in the meantime, its been little patches here and there, all of which are making me feel like I'm not really getting anywhere. I've also been sick with a fever the past few days so I haven't been able to stitch for a few days. Sae has probably already caught up and overtaken me. :( I'm still sick though no longer stuck in bed all day but I'm too tired to sit and stitch for long.

Well here's my very patchy work:

As you can see, I've abandoned my column by column plan and have just been winging it. Once I'm done with this page, which hopefully will be soon, I'll go back to having a plan.

Catch Up Time!

2008-06-23T00:07:00.000-07:00

Well, as Eel said in her previous post, she's had lots of time to get a big jump on me. I think that when we were comparing notes, the biggest margin she's had so far was about 1000 stitches. As of one week ago, the difference was about 800 stitches, so I've had to play catch up time.

What makes it worse was that last week, for some reason, I kept getting headaches around lunch time, which would last until I got back from work. When I get headaches, the only thing that will cure them is Panadol + sleep. This carried on for about three days straight, and I started to get worried that something was wrong with me. Thankfully, since then, I haven't had another one yet (touch wood!), but the amount of stitching during that time obviously was much less.

It's been a struggle to finish my 2nd page, mainly because of the confetti stitches. I ended up doing quite a bit of a new page, instead of finishing off the 2nd page. Finally, last week, I decided not to put things off any longer, and finished it!

One thing that I discovered last week was that I had made quite a big mistake in my design. There were two symbols in my design, one was a longer, thinner cross, and one was a short, fat cross. I didn't know that there were two different crosses, and used the wrong colour for one section.

If you take a look at an older picture, can you notice the brighter purple patch in the middle of all the subtle pinks? Yes, that should be a really light colour, almost whitish.

I was deliberating what to do over that patch. The good thing is that my design has quite a lot of patchy background, so it doesn't look quite so bad. I didn't want to go over it with a double strand of thread, as I thought that it would make that section quite bumpy and obvious, so in the end, I went over it with one strand of thread. It doesn't cover it entirely, but it's definitely not so obvious now.

It's now changed to a lighter shade of purple, similar to the purple bits on the left, so I'm quite happy about that. Also, I started to get paranoid about the cloth becoming dirty. Especially the parts where the Q-snaps are, because I'm constantly holding that part. I wanted to buy some felt to put under the clamps, but I have no idea where to get any. So, instead, I cut up one of my old tops, and used that instead. :D I'm sure it will still get dirty, but at least this will help keep it cleaner for a while longer!

Couch Week

2008-06-09T05:23:00.000-07:00

Happy Queen's Birthday! Today was a public holiday for me and I've also taken the rest of this week off, I'm calling it my Couch Week. Sounds lazy and unproductive but actually I'm hoping to get ahead of Sae in my HAED. And it looks like I already have, even though my Couch Week has only just started. Earlier tonight, I counted my work and I'm at about 9540 stitches. I've only got a few more squares to go and I will be done with my 3rd page.

I'm onto the skirt drape bit, and its got quite a lot of solid colour blocks fortunately. However, I have been building up a few single stitch holes here and there. The reason being that these stitches require new colours that I've never used before and I can't bring myself to do the tedious work of separating strands of thread. All for 3-4 stitches here and there. (Unlike Sae, I don't cheat in my single stitch colour changes :p)

After I'm done with this page, I think I will take a day off before starting on the next page. After all, I do want to have some actual couch potato time.

As I'm off work this week and the progress chart is saved on my work computer, I'll update it next week.

Daylight stitching

2008-06-08T19:48:00.000-07:00

I haven't been stitching on my HAED as much as I would like over the past week. I've actually been trying to finish off one of my charity quilt pieces, that I promised to Quilts4Kids. I managed to finish it on Friday night, so the bits of the weekend that I was at home were spent cross stitching.

I really like doing cross stitch in the natural light. Normally, the only times I have free are at night, after work. The shadows always make it a little bit difficult, but I've been managing pretty well. On Saturday morning, I think I was going really fast because of the sunlight coming in from behind me! It made me feel really happy to stitch in the sun. :D

Eel doesn't seem to be online, so I'd better record this before I forget. As of today, I've completed approximately 9,100 stitches. And I can see a picture forming!

Truthfully, I kind of wish that I was back to stitching the background! There are HEAPS of colour changes now, and a lot of them are just one / two stitches. I don't want to cheat and just use whatever colour is nearest, that's dangerous now that it's actually the picture. All the colour changes are really slowing me down now, but it is more interesting to see something other than a blob of purple.

In other HAED news, Eel and I have added a new clause to the competition. We felt that we should spice it up a bit, because at the rate we're going, we should have no problems at all finishing within the timeline. I suggested that we see who finishes first, and that person will get 60%, and the other one will get 40% of the money.

The catch is that my design is about 8,000 stitches more than hers, so it's not fair for me. Eel said that I have more experience, so I need to give her an advantage, so we've decided on the following. 'Completed' for her means completing the whole design, which is 206,000 and for me, it would be 210,400 stitches. So, I'm giving her a head start of 4,400 stitches, which is a whole lot!

As of the last update, I was ahead of her by 400 or so stitches, but she's going to be on leave for one whole week with nothing to do but play games and stitch! Plus I'm going to go on a couple of holidays soon, so I'd better hurry up and get stitching!

I Can See The Second Tile Groove!

2008-05-26T06:47:00.000-07:00

Well, 26 days have passed since we've started this competition and time for another progress update. I'm onto my second page now, opting to go sideways instead of upwards. And this second page has been quite nice and fast as lots of the middle bits have been the same colour. I think I'll be able to finish this page by the end of this week, hopefully even sooner than that.

This time I've taken photos of both my highlighted page as well as my cloth:
As you can see, I now have a highlighter :). Doesn't really look like much left huh? But there's lot of single stitches here and there and those take a long time.

I'm beginning to see the second tile groove which is quite motivating. Have a look at the original design:
It looks like the next page will be the start of her skirt drape. So I'm definitely getting somewhere, which is nice :).

I'll update the progress chart on the side tomorrow. I'm also keeping a weekly/fortnightly progress chart which I'll post later in the competition. It'll be quite fun to see just how we're both charting.

Three week mark

2008-05-25T23:33:00.000-07:00

I've settled down to HAED-ing quite nicely over the past week or so. Midway through the 2nd week or so, I started to feel oh-so-bored of doing nothing but HAED all the time. I really needed something to take my mind off the fact that I was sewing and sewing, and still seeing no picture! On the other hand, I didn't want to do anything too big, otherwise Eel would get a major advantage over me.

Well, I picked a SanMan SAL to do. Every week, a new alphabet will be released, and the designs are really tiny, so it takes a few hours to do one. That's a good break for me, and I feel refreshed after doing one of those designs. So far, A - C have been released, and D should be out tomorrow. You can check out pictures of my progress thus far at my blog.

As for my HAED, I finished page 1 last weekend. I really had a sense of achievement after finishing the page, it looked so nice and squarey! OK, not really squarey...Before I began the HAED, I did some research to see how other people sewed their HAEDs. I found the strangest photos with threads dangling all over, and this technique was called parking the threads. I wondered why on earth people would do that, and resolved that mine would be nice and neat.

Well, just look at my picture!

See the threads at the top?!? I think I'm beginning to understand why people do it. The page / square is finished at that point, but the same colours are used in the line above. I don't want to keep starting and stopping, that'd be really time consuming, so I just left it there.

OK, to be honest, it is starting to kind of annoy me though. They just keep dangling all over the place! It used to be a lot worse, but I already finished off the remaining parts on the next page. So, you could say that I'm doing the page to the side AND to the top at the same time. I'm mainly concentrating on moving to the side, but I'll probably finish up the threads at the top by the time the next update comes.

Picture wise, it seems that I may be reaching a teeny part of the picture at the bottom of the page that I'm currently working on. Hooray, progress!

When will I see a picture?

2008-05-12T18:25:00.000-07:00

Our original plan was to update the blog every two weeks, because otherwise, the progress would look so little that it wouldn't be that different. This week, we seem to have done a lot, probably because it's still early days yet, so we decided to an update again.

For me, it's moving along much more quickly than the first few days. However, my attention span has dropped severely over the last day or so. Perhaps it's because I seem to be stitching on nothing but background all the time! It looks like my first couple of pages are pure background, and I won't be reaching the picture for ages yet.

Here's what mine looks like so far. It's progressed a lot more than the first pic, but it still looks like a purple blob. One of the things that has been motivating me to work faster, is the fact that Eel's design is quite a bit smaller than mine. When we were calculating the stitch size, mine was 214,800 and hers was 206,000. That sounded pretty close, so we went ahead with those designs. But on further thought, that makes mine 8,800 stitches more than hers, and assuming it's 100 stitches per hour, that's 88 hours more I have to do!

As a progress comparison, I always like to show a picture of my chart design. Since my cloth count is so small, it never looks like I've done much, but look at the design, and it looks much better.

See, I've done almost 3/4 of the page! Then I remember...I have 49 pages in total. :(

Slow and Steady Wins the Race

2008-05-12T05:16:00.000-07:00

Today, me and Sae compared results and it seems like Sae's been really flying through her stitches. :( I won the first week but in the second week, Sae's left me in the dust. However, my results seem to be consistent, I'm chugging along at the same rate. So it looks like I'm the tortoise and Sae's the hare for now. And we all know the tortoise wins in the end. :)

I've started gridding on the front and what a time-saver that is! Here's what I've done in the last week.

Looks a lot more than last week, but before my brain flies too high in the clouds, here's something to bring me down again:

Well back to more stitching, need to get my lead back!

What Have We Gotten Ourselves Into??

2008-05-05T06:10:00.000-07:00

Well, the race has begun and I'm really starting to question, "Just what have we gotten ourselves into?" Though its only been 4 days, I still feel like I should've accomplished more. I knew I'd be slow, but due to the immense size of this, its going really slow! Firsly, the cloth is huge so moving my hand from front to back takes longer. I've started on the bottom left so its actually the easiest place for mamouvering my hand around. I can't imagine what it will be like when I'm stitching the top right sections.

Another mistake I made was to grid on the back. At the time, I was paranoid that if I was to grid on the front, it would be seen. But though 18ct cloth is not that fine, 2 strands still seem to be pretty good coverage so I should've just gridded on the front. I might take some time this weekend to do that, as trying to reference where I am from the back of the cloth is just screwing up my brain.

This morning, Sae and I compared notes while chatting on MSN at work. I told her that I had finished six 10x10 squares and three 5x10 squares, making my total stitches at 750. When I got home however, I looked over what I'd done and it was more. :D So far, I've done ten 10x10 squares and five 5x10 squares. So my actual total stitches is 1250. Here's what I've done. Can you see any pattern emerging yet?

Here's my page with the red marking what I've done. I also discovered that I don't actually have any highlighters at home. How sad. :(

So while I'm quite stoked that for the moment I'm ahead of Sae, the sight of the rest of the cloth is quite daunting:

How long will I maintain this tiny lead against Sae? Stay tuned for our next progress update!

My first HAED weekend

2008-05-04T18:45:00.000-07:00

Well, my first HAED weekend is over, and I'm already wondering if I've bitten off more than I can chew. And if I'm finding it tough, what more for Eel, who has only been doing cross stitch for a couple of months! It's really been a learning curve for me, but I'm finding it slightly easier with all the changes I've made since starting.

I had my needle ready at 12.01 am on the 1st of May. Soon after starting, I was already finding it so difficult. My cloth was huge and draped all over my legs, and was making me feel really hot! I also started by doing in-hand stitching, but that was a really bad idea. My hand started getting all cramp-y, trying to hold the masses of cloth and stitch at the same time. Also, there were so many colour changes, I was getting lost in the design, and was wasting lots of time trying to find out where I was. So, what changes did I make?

First, and most useful, I started using my Q-snaps. I'm only using the 11" ones, I think, they're relatively lighter compared to the 17" ones (and smaller!). When I sew, I rest it on my knees, and so have both hands free, I don't need to hold the cloth at all. That was working quite well, but I still had lots of cloth hanging all over the sides of the frame, so I stole two clothes hangers from my mum, and have rolled up the fabric and clipped it together to make it more manageable. It's hanging out quite a lot in the picture, but when I sew, it's all tucked at the back, which is much easier.

The only thing I'm wondering is whether the clips will make any marks on the cloth as time goes by. I suppose it doesn't really matter, I've discovered that on 22ct fabric, the coverage is so so complete, that whatever marks that I've made with my water soluble pen totally disappear. This being the case, I'm thinking that I won't waste my water soluble ink, and just use a regular pen instead. Here's a close up of the work that I've done.

Can you believe that that is HOURS of work?? And that's only a teeny tiny corner of one page! Earlier on, when we were discussing mini deadlines, we said we should do about a quarter of a page a week. I really think that's going to be tough!

Oh, and as for me getting lost in the design, I've decided to use a highlighter to mark out the rows that I've done, and that really helps me out. At first, I was only marking it off as I finished the thread, but that wasn't working too well. I was still getting a bit lost, so I now mark the paper as I finish every row, and that's been great so far.

You can get a really good idea of how much I've completed from this one page. And there are something like 40+ pages in our designs....

PS: Do you know that HAED is having a 25% discount off their designs to celebrate Mother's Day? Hahaha...I feel so tempted to get something else now!

On Your Mark, Get Set....

2008-04-30T00:10:00.000-07:00

As Sae has said in her last post, time has really just whizzed by so fast! I feel as if it was just yesterday that I said to her "Do a HAED too, we'll race." And now, we're less than half a day away from the start of our 5 year competition.

Over the weekend, I gridded my cloth. Sae suggested using a water soluble pen so I went and got one. I tested it on another bit of cloth, drew it on, wiped it with a damp cloth and the mark went away. However, after about an hour, it came right back! So I decided to dump that idea and went back to good ol' pencils.

Here's a pic of my gridding, it looks so nice and neat that its made me really itchy to start:

I also cut off the excess cloth and taped the edges with masking tape to prevent fraying. I also organised all the threads into two boxes with compartments according to the DMC numbers. There's a whole lot of purple! Here's more pics of my preparations:

One more thing I've done to gear up for this race is to set up a savings account for the monthly USD$20 that we'll be putting aside as prize money. I hunted around a little bit and decided on HSBC's Serious Saver. Mainly because I already have a HSBC account and the interest is at 7.5% for every month that I don't make any withdrawals. So it sounds pretty perfect for this purpose. It'll take about 5 days til I get access to the account, but 5 days loss of interest isn't that much. Especially when Sae's account is only going to be generating 3.9%.

Another little prep I've done is to pick out the first 5 colours that I'll need and separate out each strand, all ready to be threaded into a needle. I might thread all 5 colours onto 5 different needles. I can do that tonight before midnight.

I really can't wait to get started! I'll get a 2 hour headstart on Sae, but she's got all of tomorrow off so she'll definitely beat me this week. But we have 5 years to go so slow and steady wins the race!

The time draws nigh

2008-04-28T19:26:00.000-07:00

Have you ever noticed, how it's mainly older people that say that time flies? I definitely don't remember saying it when I was younger, so I guess I'm getting older, as I really think that time flies! In a blink of an eye, this HAED competition will be starting in a couple of days time.

I've hardly done any preparation for myself, the cloth I ordered on eBay arrived a couple of weeks ago, but I didn't touch it until yesterday. Eel has been bugging me to update our blog, so I decided that it was time for me to prep my cloth.

I took it out of the packaging (I decided to go with a 22ct Hardanger), and it was really creased all over. I've learned that just ironing it isn't good enough to remove the creases, so I dampened the creases with water, and that did the trick. It was pretty difficult ironing it, my ironing table isn't that big, so every time I ironed the top, the middle would get creases from the edge of the table! It still isn't perfect, but I figure that it will get crease-y when I stitch anyway, so as long as I remove the major creases, it should be OK.

The cloth is really huge, much bigger than anything I've ever done before. I put it on my legs, and Terence remarked that it could be a blanket! Here's a pic to show you how large it is, I've added a thread to the picture, so that you get a better perspective of the size.

I also gridded the first row and column of the design using a water soluble pen. Normally, I don't grid (in fact, I've never gridded before!), but seeing how this design is 400 x 537, I thought that I should grid it. It will make less opportunities for mistakes, and I always seem to be quite mistake-prone. Reading the HAED forums gave me a few ideas about gridding, some do it with normal sewing thread, but I think that would take way too long, and I always look for a short cut. Some use fishing line (?!?), but the comment I found the most useful was water soluble pen! I already have one, so I decided to go with that instead.

I've gridded it in blocks of 10x10, I think it'll take me quite awhile to finish the first row, which is all I've done so far. I also gridded the first column, to make sure that the cloth I have is big enough. So, I'm more or less all set, and ready for the 1st of May. Bring on the competition!

Some Thoughts on Preparation Work

2008-04-08T19:15:00.000-07:00

Following on from my 'Stocking up my inventory" actitivites, Sae has managed to get all my cloth and threads for me. All except for some special Kreinik 032 thread which is apparently some metallic Pearl coloured thread. I'll have to hunt for that myself, or look at what kind of substitutes I can use. So my supplies are almost ready and are in transit somewhere in the world, waiting to get back to me on the 18th.

We've decided that any or all prep work can happen before 1st May, such as gridding, preparing the cloth, whatever and what not. Just as long as there's no stitching. For myself, I'm going to go hunt up a water soluble pen to draw 10x10 grids on the cloth. I'd probably do the top row and the first column just to make sure that I'm leaving enough space on the sides. And then I'd grid maybe a month's worth of stitching. Not too sure yet. We'll see how it goes once I get my hands on the cloth.

Other than that, I'm going to need to decide what to do to prevent the cloth from fraying. Sae says she uses masking tape. So maybe I'll go with that too. Some sites have recommended doing a blanket stitch on the perimeter. I have no idea how to do that and it sounds like a lot of work. So masking tape is sounding better at the moment.

I'd also get the pattern all ready and printed too. Maybe mark out goals or set out the pace for myself. Set up some kind of inventory sorting system for all my threads. At the moment, I use 2 strands to stitch and with 18ct cloth, Sae has told me that 2 strands will be good too. I normally separate out a single strand and thread it through the needle with equal lengths so that when I stitch, I have 2 strands. Its much neater and doesn't cause unnecessary tangles so I think I will keep doing that. So for my prep work, I'd also like to start preparing my lengths of thread and separating it out into single strands. That will save some time while I'm stitching.

Well for now, I'm a lot of talk but no action. Just wait til I get my hands on my supplies! I'm going to make as much use of this planning month as I can.

The foundation has been built

2008-04-02T18:44:00.000-07:00

As Eel said in her previous post, she has chosen her pattern and 18ct Aida for the competition. As for me, I still have till the end of the month to decide whether I want to change the pattern or not. I'm hesitating to buy it at the moment, after all, the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. ;) I'm test driving my 18ct Aida, it's pretty easy to stitch on, but I do need a brighter light to work on it, so I'm not sure what the 22ct Aida will be like. I should be able to finish my tiny design by Friday, and can test out the 22ct over the weekend. So, my fabric should be locked down by Monday!

Eel's been cracking her whip, making me get all the 'ingredients' for her. ;) So far, I've got most of the threads as well as a meter of 18ct Aida. Here's what it looks like so far.

Notice a colour trend here? :D And the colours that I haven't gotten yet are ALSO purple! Oh well, I suppose mine would be similar, seeing how that it's also purply.

Whenever I start a new project, it never looks like that as a lot of my threads are already half used. It all looks so nice and new, I feel like rushing out to buy all the threads that I need as well. Only...27 days till the start of the competition!

Patterns: Locked Down! Fabric: Locked Down!

2008-04-02T00:21:00.000-07:00

We've achieved lock-down for our HAED patterns! Check it out:
We were debating whether we should go for this pairing, or a bigger sized one. That second option would have been Sae's Lily of the Valley and my Advice from a Caterpillar. Since first and second option were my favourites out of my lot anyway, I really didn't mind either. In the end we settled on the smaller and easier of the two. After all, this will be the first time I've ever cross-stitched anything properly from a proper cross-stitch pattern. And the biggest cross-stitch I've ever done is about the size of my hand so anything to lessen the challenge is good!

Since I want to get threads from Sae, I've gone ahead and bought the pattern. So I'm pretty much really locked in to my decision. As for Sae, she still have some time to mull it over and change her choice, as long as the size remains the same.

I bought the pattern for USD19.00 as I decided to go for the larger chart for ease of viewing. Downloaded it, cracked it open and just for the pattern, its 48 pages long! Each page has 5200 stitches on it. What have we gotten ourselves into??

We did some calculations and determined that for my pattern, I'd need to do about 126 stitches per day and I will be finished in 4.5 years just in time for the deadline. Doesn't sound like an awful lot but I am pretty slow and if I do miss out on a day, I have to make sure to catch up or I'll start lagging by a lot.

I've also decided to use 18ct Aida fabric, which Sae is also getting for me. She found out today that the shop near her work has it for really cheap so might as well grab that off her while I have a chance.

All this planning and calculating and discussing has gotten me quite pumped and I actually can't wait to get started. Still a month to go before our start date but in the meantime, I'd better get my stitching speed up!

Welcome to our HAED competition!

2008-03-29T01:44:00.000-07:00

This blog has been created by Eel and myself to document our HAED competition progress. You can read up about our competition 'rules' on the sidebar, so I won't talk too much about that.

I started cross stitching when I was about 10, but lost interest in it after awhile. About half a year ago, my interest in it started again. Recently, Eel's just begun cross stitching as well! The powers of peer pressure, huh? ;) She's been talking about stitching huge pieces, and I suggested a HAED design, as they're really huge and cool. She said that I should do one at the same time, and that's how our idea of a competition began.

Eel and I are similar in lots of ways. We're both avid readers, we were both in the school band years ago, at one point we were even desk mates in class. Although we're in different countries, we always have lots to talk about when we meet up (even every day when we're at work!). So, this competition should be a pretty fun way to encourage each other to keep on stitching on our HAEDs.

Anyway, our first 'deadline' is to come up with a few design choices by Monday, and then we'll choose the two that have the most similar dimensions so that it's fair. There are so many gorgeous designs on the website, that it's been difficult to choose from them all! Also going through my head was the thought that I'm going to have to stare at it for the next 5 years, so it'd better be something that I really love. After sifting through what seems like hundreds of photos, I've found a few possibilities.

Forest Light by Jonathon Earl Bowser
Finished Design Size 350W by 571H
(14W X 22-3/8H inches on 25ct)

Waiting by Jonathon Earl Bowser
Finished Design Size 450 W by 683 H
(18 W X 27-1/4 inches on 25ct)

Lily of the Valley by Rachel Anderson
Finished Design Size 400W by 600H
(16 W X24 inches on 25ct)

Mountain Beauty by Jim Warren
Finished Design Size 400 W by 592 H
(16 W X 23-5/8 H inches on 25ct fabric)

Eve of Enchantment by Nadia Tate
Finished Design Size 400 W by 537 H
(16 W X 21-3/8 H inches on 25ct fabric)

The last design is totally different compared to the previous four. Terence likes that one, and that's why it's in the running at the moment. Decisions, decisions, it's a tough one! Another thing to think about once the design has been chosen is the choice of fabric to use. And that's worth a whole 'nother post some time...

Choices, choices...

2008-03-28T20:01:00.001-07:00

Well, Sae's beat me to the first post so I won't bother going through how this competition started out. Now all that's left is to find a few patterns that I like.

For myself, I'm keen to get a pattern locked down because I want to get threads off Sae. I've got a friend visiting Sae soon who can bring those threads back for me, so I'm working to a deadline. ;)

Heaven and Earth Designs have so many patterns! I'm going crazy just browsing through them all but I want to make sure I pick something that I won't get bored off in the next 5 years. So far, here are my choices:

Night Wish by Annie Rodrigue
Finished Design Size 400 W by 515 H
(16 W X 20-1/2inches on 25ct)

Advice from a Caterpillar by Scott Gustafson
Stitch Count 450w x 550h

Fantasies of the Sea by James C Christensen
Finished Design Size 400W by 615H
(16W X 24-1/2H inches on 25ct fabric)

Conversations Around Fish by James C Christensen
Finished Design Size 575W by 405H
(16W X 16-1/8H inches on 25ct fabric)

Amid Hummers by Jody Bergsma
Finished Design Size 300W by 445H
(12W X 17-3/4H inches on 25ct)

I'm sure there are tons more that are really cool though.

I had Chen-po look through a few with me and he just wants all the evil, demonic looking ones. I asked my mum as well and she just wants all flowers and babies. So I've given up on both and am choosing purely on what I like.