Send Me Blackwork Flowers Every Morning, Send Me Blackwork Flowers By The Mail...

I love blackwork. I love the designs, I love that it is more flexible than cross-stitch but still sets limits making your stretch your imagination. Of course I never do my blackwork in black thread and about half the time I make designs that use more than one color. My favorite creation so far is a set of flowers I designed myself and practice-stitched in ultra bright thread on black Aida cloth.

So here for your use and enjoyment I post a couple flower designs and a blueberry + leaf design. If you use these designs please credit me and either link back to this blog or my Flickr account. I tend to end up using various half stitches or ending a stitch in the middle of a square, just so you know that those aren't mistakes in the pattern.

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I'm also about half-way done with a new cross-stitch pattern. I created this pattern from a picture of the comic book character Obelix. I grew up reading Asterix comics and Obelix was always my favorite character. We had tons and tons of books in our house when I was kid, including nearly all of the Asterix comics. I have vivid memories of looking through them before I could read and wanting so desperately to be able to understand them, to figure out the mystery of these fascinating books. Then once I could read I tore through them, over and over, re-reading a minimum of ten each week and pestering my dad non-stop to translate the Latin phrases and explain the more historical jokes.

Through those comics I developed a life-long love for the history of ancient Rome, Julius Caesar, and the Gallic wars. I read biographies and histories, watched documentaries, and above all I daydreamed. I live in West Virginia, my mother's family all lived in Texas and New Mexico so we took two and three day drives twice a year. Much of that time I spent lost in wild daydreams of myself as a Roman Centurion in Caesar's thirteenth legion, battling the Gauls at Gergovia and Alesia.

It was inevitable that I would one day embroider those characters, starting with Obelix. I love how he's turning out so far. There are some details you can't see here, blackwork accents to be added about the color (mostly in the shoes, which look icky without the color and those details). In general though I think it is tres Obelix.