skater43 stitches Zelda games

[Firehawke]

Congrats on getting so much done on Minish! And good luck with the new project!!

[skater43]

Thank you. While we still have weeks of work left in Minish Cap, I am seeing the end, we're getting to the last bits. Looking forward to finishing it up this Summer and seeing how the final product turns out. Still think Twilight Princess will be my most impressive looking picture, but this one will be up there because of all the colors used and the details.

Plan to post an update on King Zora this weekend. Things are moving along, but I think to finish by the end of April, we'll need to increase our daily stitching time a bit. Plan to kick things up to 90 minutes a day, from 60 minutes, and see how that goes. But progress is being made and we have done a fair amount. But since we do have a bit of a deadline so we can get it framed in time, we're going to have to step things up a notch.

[skater43]

As mentioned yesterday in my other thread, we are back undertaking Minish Cap. Started back in on it on the 16th, so we've gotten another 2 1/2 weeks or so under out belt. Including today's stitching time, we are now up to 246 hours total on this project. Made a lot of progress, but I'd say at
least a couple of months still to go. We have started down the curve on the right side, but we still have 40ish columns to go from our farthest point stitched thus far. And then everything below. But I expect we can do the rest with three more hoop moves, maybe only two depending on how things line up when we move it down and how much of the right side we can then cover. When I left off in February, I spent the last few days just doing black outlines so that I could easily get back into this and that proved to be a good move. Spent the first week+ just doing some of the little stitches here and there within the big fill sections. So that was much time but not much overall progress. However, they still need to be done. And with those done, I could do the fill sections a little faster, knowing I had everything else filled in and didn't need to worry about saving a square for another color. If you look closely, I did miss two squares in the blue sections, so we'll have to go back for those, but hardly a big deal. Plan tomorrow is to finish filling in the green of Ezlo, which will finish him off, hit those two squares in the blue, then prolly fill in the stuff above the sword. Plan is to move the hoop down next, so
overall plan for this hoop is start at the top and work our way down. I don't think I will have the hoop done/moved before the next WIP pic in three weeks, but I expect most of it to be filled. We shall see.

And planning ahead, Thursday, I stopped by Michael's to go thread shopping for Spirit Tracks. Was able to get almost every color I need, minus about 6. And they are colors Michael's normally carries, they just happened to be out. So, every so often, we'll pop in there again and see about getting those missing colors. Still have plenty of time, so don't need to resort to ordering them online just yet.

[skater43]

Hoop is moved and we are moving along. Moved it yesterday near the start of stitch time, so yesterday and first part of today was spent clearing up our loose threads in this area. Rest of today was spent doing some more outlining. You can see we've got most of the handle of the third sword outlined and off to the right, you can maybe make out some of the outline of the fourth sword. So that gives some idea, based on the swords being symmetrical and all, of how far we are, and how much we still have to go. I will need to move the hoop twice more to finish everything, but the last hoop movement won't have a lot of work to do in it, just the upper right stuff. Including today's work, we're now 267 hours in and I'm thinking we're going to finish around the 375ish hour mark. There isn't a lot of big patches of color in this hoop, or the next, which means more thread switching which means slower progress. So I'm figuring this hoop will take until the end of July. Next hoop will also take a bit, so I'm guessing we finish that mid-September. And as I said, last hoop won't have a lot to it, so couple of weeks, maybe. So current ballpark finish date is the end of September. As we've learned, things change and things go faster or slower than expected, so we'll see. But that's my current best guess. And for those wondering, July 5, 2023 is when we started this, so we're almost at the one year anniversary. And I just checked. Twilight Princess took 336 hours, so this will (almost certainly) surpass that. But it will be a short lived record as I'm seeing Spirit Tracks blowing it out of the water.

In other projects news: SGDQ prize was delivered last week and is on the list of accepted prizes https://tracker.gamesdonequick.com/tracker/prizes/48 Event starts next Sunday (check your local listings https://gamesdonequick.com/schedule/48 ) but they haven't started assigning prizes to games/blocks yet. Friday morning, a couple of Zelda games are being run, so that's a possibility. Other one is Friday night where Ocarina of Time (which is the game depicted) is a bonus game, it will be played if a set level of donations is reached. We'll see what they decide. Personally, I'd rather it be Friday morning because I'll be able to see it highlighted live (for the first time). But Friday evening will have a higher viewership and will feature the game I stitched. But once I see the prize blocks are set, I'll let you guys know so you know when to watch for it.

Still waiting for Flipull to be finished and framed, but since that event isn't until January, I'm not worried about it. It's stitched, it's in the capable hands of The Artery, we'll get it when we get it.

And the other week I stopped by Michael's and got the last few colors for Spirit Tracks I was missing, so we are all set to go on that, once we finish Minish Cap. We finish Minish the end of September, that'll give us roughly five months to get Spirit Tracks started before we start work on SGDQ 2025 and AGDQ 2026 stuff.

[Firehawke]

You are zooming right along! And yay for getting the rest of the colors you needed!

[skater43]

Thank you. Look for an update Sunday, but yeah, things are coming together here faster at the end than I was expecting/I didn't have as much to go as I thought. Seeing how this hoop has gone and where we are relative to the right edge of the picture, I think we will be finishing closer to the beginning of September than the end (end of August might be pushing it, but once I move the hoop, which I might actually do this weekend/early next week depending on how far right I have completed, we'll have a better idea of how much further I have to go).

Happy my first trip to Michael's I was able to get almost all the colors I needed. And the ones I was missing, they carried, just were out of stock. But happier that the next trip, I was able to get the rest. Saves the trouble of ordering just a couple of skeins or shopping around or anything. Got the pattern, got the cloth, got the colors, everything is all set for Spirit Tracks, which is awesome.

[skater43]

As alluded to/mentioned earlier, we're closer to finishing than I previously thought. Educated guess because of the fabric in the hoop, but the pen is about where the right edge of the picture is. We've basically done everything to the left of column 175, and a good chunk of the remaining 50 columns has been stitched. Still a few weeks away, but newest estimate puts us finishing closer to the start of September than the end. As I said above, I think the end of August might be pushing it, but we'll see how the next few weeks shake out. This week, we'll continue stitching our way rightward and at some point, maybe middle of the week, we'll move the hoop right so we can get to work on the rest of the lower right corner.

Meanwhile, we made a lot of progress in this hoop. Aside from a half dozen or so stitches, the third sword is done and we've done some work on the fourth. Third jewel is done and most of the fourth. Bottom edge is done up to near the edge of the right side of the hoop. And a bunch of extra stuff in the middle. Other than the bottom edge, we can see at least a few decent sized patches of one color, so that helped move things along. Today's work was mostly few stitches here and there and several individual stitches, so not quite as showy/flashy, but as I say, every stitch done is one closer to finishing. And they all have to be done at some point. As mentioned above, plan is to finish the third sword, and filling in holes from the left and some time this week, we'll shift the hoop right. We will then have to move it up to get the last of the picture, but most of our remaining time
should/will likely be spent with the next hoop move.

For mostly my own records, we are now at 288 hours, including today's work. Last time, I ballparked finishing in about 375 hours, but that is looking to be rather on the high side. Think we'll actually finish closer to 325, but we'll see. Looking back, I see our first WIP pic was July 23 last year, so we started July 2 or 3. So just over a year since we started this, though obviously we had a break in there while we did GDQ stuff.

And speaking of GDQ, for those wondering, final tally of SGDQ 2024 was $2.573 million raised for Doctors Without Borders. Have to doublecheck, but almost certain that is more than was raised at AGDQ 2024 and is a new GDQ record. AGDQ 2025 will be January 5-12 and you can see some of their other upcoming stuff at https://gamesdonequick.com/

[blackmageheart]

Definitely getting there!

[skater43]

We are indeed! Moved the hoop earlier this week as expected and have spent the past couple of days working on reaching the lower right corner. There are two stitches I think I can sneak in to finish the corner without having to shift the hoop, but we'll see first thing tomorrow (beyond that, we have plenty of space on the right side to finish that edge of the picture. So we should just have to move the hoop up a bit to finish the picture, unless we have to shift it to finish the corner). Otherwise, my goal this weekend is finish the bottom 10 or so rows of the picture, which are all of one page of the pattern. So we finish that, that'll be 7 of 9 pages completed. Have done some outlining in this hoop and we'll likely spend some time next week doing more, just to give us some reference points, especially for the right edge of the picture. From there, plan is roughly to work our way from the bottom up so that we can move the hoop sooner rather than later to finish things off. Still a few weeks to go, but the end is starting to come into focus.

[Firehawke]

Oooh...getting super close! And that's fantastic that SGDK raised so much!