Ivy: lessons, brain fog and flares

Hello everybody! Here I am with another progress update, and a very satisfying one for me personally, because Ivy is finished except for the wings:

Isn't she just so pretty? She's looking delightfully human, and I have to say I rather like it (believe it or not, I'm not a big fairy fan). However, I do feel like the design would miss out a lot if I don't stitch in the wings, so I will probably do so!

This week of stitching has actually been pretty hard, and I don't just mean cross-stitch-wise. To begin with, we were extra busy with my in-laws, who are the sweetest couple alive, but the extra activities just pushed me over the edge and of course my fibro flared. Which in turn triggered the brain fog (in case someone doesn't know what brain fog feels like, it's basically this: you try to think, but your head is full of molasses. You try to walk, but are trying to walk through molasses). And the brain fog basically meant that I made a lot of counting mistakes, so Ivy's skirt is actually riddled with mistakes that I tried to fix as I went, but because I couldn't think clearly it was like drunk-stitching, which depending on your mood can be as hilarious as it sounds. I even confused one color for the other (honestly, don't ask...) and had to undo three whole sections, and let me tell you something, that stuff takes so much time. Insert big existential sigh.

And then to top it all off, thanks to Spanish Flosstube, I learned that the fabric that I buy at my local shop, the fabric that most sewing shops in Spain carry, is not actually aida. It's called "Panama fabric" and it does not have perfectly symmetrical squares: depending how you stitch, the stitches will come out rather flat or slightly elongated. Which is why poor Ivy over here looks a little bit squashed.

But anyway. Every cloud has a silver lining, am I right? And the good thing that came from all this is that now I know something new about cross-stitching, and I got to spend extra quality time with my cats!

And we got to visit a nearby cafe that we'd never been to, with beautiful views over the golf course:

So all in all, I can't complain. I hope everybody is having a good week and enjoying something stitchy! See you next time and until then, happy stitching :)