Away

Please excuse the absence. I am on my week of beach-vacation!

Madre and I are the type who like the beach best when no one else is around and when the weather isn't massively hot.

I will hopefully post a proper entry tonight.

Home again, home again...

Today was long. Well, okay, last week was long in general and today's eight hour drive was just the tipping point for my body to completely shut down. I have levels of shut down. Sometimes a good complete four or five hour rest followed by a long sleep is enough to get me back to subnormal, but that pre-supposes I'll get more rest the next day, which I don't get if I'm away from home.

The result is that by the end of the week I stop getting any relief from sleep. So the car ride home tends to be punctuated by me taking breaks to start getting drunk bright and early or just generally groaning and being crabby. Or in the case of this drive, insisting on reading aloud from one of my favorite books to my mother for hours on end. One does what one can.

I finally did buckle down and start the vine border on my Frida Kahlo piece. As with most everything about that piece, I am loving the result! There will be three or four different types of vine, different shades of green and brown, but also one that's smooth, one with thorns, etc... I'm doing the smooth one first in deep green with highlights in kelly green satin thread which is producing a wonderful effect.

It was a really nice beach week, in any case. We had a couple super beautiful days with perfect weather, I got a few good pictures, found a four record set of Baroque music and La Traviata record set for fifty cents each (both look like they were never played), and added a pretty tea cup to my collection.

My replacement Wacom tablet pen arrived so I've gotten straight to work on smoothing out some of my embroidery patterns and have begun making the PDF files for the patterns that I'll sell in Hardcore StitchCorps when it opens on Etsy.

I may spend the next two days lying still and sleeping, but one thing I learned very quickly into my disability was that it's always worth it to push yourself farther than you should. Not that you should do it for weeks and months on end, but you should as often as you can. Mental health is more important than physical health, after all.

Rest and Needlework...

A day of needlework is not necessary a day of rest. Your hands cramp up, your eyes hurt and vision blurs, and no matter how relaxed you start out somehow you slowly become completely hunched over.

You know what's so cool though? Our regular seafood restaurant in Morehead City has all these needlework pieces hanging up, including a blackwork piece of their entire menu and a huge cross-stitch of the recipe for their clam chowder. It makes my stomach happy (like when you're just warm and excited and your stomach feels a little flippy).

I didn't get all that much done today. There was a lot of distracting TV, such as those Animal Cops shows which suck me in every time. I think every pet owner (esp. if the pet is primarily indoors) sometimes feels insecure about whether or not they are really providing the best life possible. Sometimes I feel like my disability makes me a poorer pet owner, but just watch a few Animal Cops episodes and suddenly you'll know you're a super great caregiver. It's refreshing.

Among my few achievements is the fact that I did a test-stitch of a cross-stitch bird motif and developed a blackwork feather design. I did my flower garland test yesterday (with a few mistakes) but decided it wasn't appropriate for the text piece I originally designed it for. Mixing blackwork and cross-stitch is always tricky for me. Oh little bits of cross-stitch, individual stitches mixed, that looks great, but blackwork text with cross-stitch borders... there's my problem.

My feather's finished design is a little different than the one shown. I would have stitched it again fully perfect but I was getting tired and there were big kitties on TV. I bet if I'd been rich and healthy I would have become one of those crazy people who keep wild cats as pets. There was a moment with a lion when I was seven or eight where I put my hand up on the glass and a lion came and put his paw up just opposite my hand. To a little girl who loved cats it was the most amazing moment ever, and it still seems quite amazing. Those animal hoarders must have smoked their sense of smell away is all I can say.

The Beach is Good for the Brain

You know how Guinness is good for you? Well you should. It is good for you. All stout is good for you.

Well what's good for me and especially for the brainstorming and idea part of me is a nice long car trip. I get great ideas, talk them over with my mom, we tweak them into exceptional ideas and I sometimes remember to write it all down.

On this trip I came up with the perfect name for my needlework shop will be open on Etsy very soon. This great shop shall be called... Hardcore StitchCorps! I am super happy with that name and have already registered it on Etsy.

Anyway, it's hard doing needlework at the beach. I'm so tired all the time and squinting at tiny holes makes me pass out (also there's cable TV which I haven't had for a few years). I'm mostly just dabbling with some new fabric (the craft store here has an AWESOME needlework section, way more stuff than my home store) and test driving new designs. I'll be here by myself all day tomorrow so hopefully I can get a little more work done.