Happy Monday!

I have a confession to make. I was so excited to start one of the projects on my list (the mouse), that I started right away on it, and totally forgot about my Saturday SAL project. The past 3 days I managed to get in close to 11 hours of time on my little mousie. That estimate includes the time I spent gridding, too.

Some story on this, I only marked the center with my marker and started right away with stitching. I only got a few stitches in when I realized that I really will need the fabric gridded, rather than winging it. My very first horizontal line was, of course, one count off. Rather than try to fix it, I just drew in the correct line and will disregard the extra one. That explains the extra line on the fabric. I also didn't want to get too close with the marker to the few stitches that I had already done, which is why there are a couple tiny areas with no marker. It's barely noticeable, though.

Here he is so far:

I know, not much to look at right now. I also have no idea why I decided to complete one color in entirety first, but it just seemed like the thing to do. Because of the way I did this, though, I won't be able to keep track of my progress, stitch- and percentage-wise.
Also, the whole thing is actually a rectangle, but the outer corners were charted as white on white. To save my sanity and hours of unneeded stitching, I am skipping the outer white parts and only doing the oval.