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

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

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

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!

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!

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.

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?

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*

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.

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! :)

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

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!

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!

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!

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. :)

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!

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!

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. :)

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....

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....