Welcome back, thread-flingers. February’s first week has come and gone, and somehow I survived without being mummified in my own fabric. Life happened, motivation dipped, and yet—miracle of miracles—some stitching actually got done.

The Week in Stitches

This week’s project was Burlesque Belly Dancer from Unconventional Cross Stitch. She’s bold, dramatic, and utterly shameless—the Cleopatra of cross stitch, if you will. Miss a stitch and she judges you like a sphinx with attitude. Sequins? Tassels? Glitter? She has them all, because subtlety is for tomb walls, not thread-flingers. Honestly, she’s a diva who occasionally threatens to curse your floss if you slack off. Perfect for the mood my brain’s currently in.

Meanwhile, my long-running paranormal obsession has quietly been entombed, replaced by ancient Egypt. I’ve been watching documentaries about pyramids, tombs, mummies, and long-dead pharaohs whose names I keep forgetting (let’s just call them “the long-dead dudes in gold” for now). Between the grandeur, the obsession with immortality, and the over-the-top monuments, it feels strangely in line with a sequined belly dancer. In short: I’m basically building a floss pyramid—brick by tiny stitchy brick.

Sunday, 1st of February, brought the highlight: a stitch battle with “mom in my phone”—my self-appointed stitch police. Naturally, I accepted. I stitched like a true pharaoh defending the Nile and finished 628 stitches to her 350. Bragging rights were loudly claimed and immediately abused. I even turned it into a mock boxing-style scoreboard, which quickly pyramid-ed into…well, something else entirely. More on that next week once I stop laughing at what I created.

The rest of the week looked like this:

Tuesday: 95 stitches
Friday: 113 stitches
Saturday: 169 stitches

On their own, these numbers might feel a little “tomb of the forgotten,” but together they prove that slow, steady, and chaotic stitching still counts.

Enter StitchPal: My Digital Papyrus

And this is exactly where StitchPal earns its stripes.

In my head, the week felt slow. Patchy. A bit like I hadn’t really stitched at all. StitchPal politely disagrees. It’s a progress-tracking app where you load in your project, set the total stitch count, and log your daily stitches. No intentions. No vague “I thought about stitching while eating cereal.” Just solid, undeniable progress. Even better, it can predict your finish date if you keep stitching at the same rate—so you can see exactly when your sequined diva will finally surrender to your needle… or when you’ll be old enough to get a pension before she’s done.

Looking back through StitchPal reframes everything. Those small, seemingly pointless days—Tuesday’s 95, Friday’s 113, Saturday’s 169—suddenly add up. They’re a trail, proof that progress exists even when my brain insists it doesn’t.

Then there’s Sunday’s 628 stitches. Seeing it in black and white is deeply satisfying. StitchPal doesn’t clap. It doesn’t cheer. It just quietly records it, like a solemn Egyptian scribe logging your life for eternity. Somewhere between burlesque sequins and ancient pyramids, StitchPal became my personal papyrus scroll of accomplishments.

Resetting my stats recently made this even better. Clean slate, no pressure from past weeks, no comparing myself to some “super stitcher” version of me. Just numbers. Honest, undeniable, eternal—like hieroglyphs etched into a tomb wall, but way less creepy.

Over the next few weeks I’ll be talking more about the apps I use, because StitchPal is a perfect example of a tool that doesn’t make you stitch faster—it just proves that even when your progress feels like sand through an hourglass, it’s actually stacking up like a pyramid brick by brick.

This week’s stitching might not have built a real pyramid, but between Burlesque Belly Dancer, a stitch battle, and a bit of ancient-obsessed inspiration, it’s proof that slow, messy, human, and gloriously un-mummified still counts.

I’ll stitch, I’ll swear, and I’ll be back—probably tangled, definitely caffeinated.