Asterix!

Obelix was one of the first patterns I created, and it's certainly taken me a long time to finish Asterix, mostly because he has more small details. Now of course I need to make a new Obelix pattern that's to the same scale as Asterix so they can be stitched together. 

Asterix is also for sale in my Etsy shop.

That may take some time though. I really want to get my next Pratchett quote started and of course there's also the wisteria piece and the chintz napkin to finish. Sigh!

On the plus side, I should be able to get a lot done in the next few days. I'm listening to a really fabulous book, Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine, and the Murder of a President. It's about President Garfield and is absolutely amazing so far. Also, Garfield was awesome! I'm not sure why there's no modern motion picture about him (him in general, not just the assassination). I'm sure a tiny bit of my new-found love is that he spoke Latin and Greek (well enough to teach them) and of course it makes me think of The West Wing and President Barlet. Can't recommend the book highly enough though!

Obelix C'est Fini!

Amid the snow and the cold I have finished my Obelix piece! I must say, I think he turned out splendidly. I am unhappy with the shoes but couldn't really find a much better way to make it work (a random mistake in my stitching meant a few extra stitches/changes here and there) so I will forget my perfectionism for now.

Of course, this means it is high time to start on my Roman piece, aka, a bit of extreme masochism. I love ancient Rome though. I'll be looking for some other images of the ancient world or quotes too. My next high ambition is to find a good piece of Vercingetorix to do - there is some rule in the movies that only extremely handsome men get to play Vercingetorix and having the nice mustache makes them even more handsome, I think! My new goal is to marry someone who's competed in the World Beard and Mustache Championships, actually. Perhaps I could lobby them to start an Ancient Gaul category.

While working on Obelix I've been watching an absolutely hilarious Scottish show called Still Game. I grew up hearing tons of accents and dialects and generally have no problem with British shows (unlike a lot of Americans, sadly). This one is a bit harder because the first three seasons (series) especially have a ton of Glaswegian slang, but I've only had to look things up a couple times. I highly recommend the show though, funniest thing I've seen in ages. Plus, it's helping me work on my accent (I can do Irish accents and all sorts of English dialects - Yorkshire is my favorite, but for some reason Scottish is much harder, probably because you hear it less).

It's a great source for quotes too, though sadly I only wrote one down so now I'll need to go back and re-watch the show to gather some more. This will almost surely be my next needlework quote piece though: "There's nay disease called Moody Bastarditis."

Or possibly a quote from another British show I finally get to re-watch after seven years or so, A Very Peculiar Practice ("Altered priorities ahead"). It stars one of my favorite actors, a Scotsman, Graham Crowden, who died at 86 a few weeks back, despite managing to look about 90 years old for the past 30 years. He also starred in the amazingly fabulous Waiting For God.

More Obelix in Progress

Today I drove my very own car for the first time. It's old, a '93 Pontiac Grand Am in that teal color that almost all the '90s Grand Ams were made in. It has a number of problems, but nothing that affects its usefulness to me. I can only drive for ten minutes or so, and some days that's pushing it. All I really want is to be able to get to the YMCA to swim and to have the option of picking up my own prescriptions, getting the occasional grocery item, and perhaps making it to a knitting group or what have you.

This my second car, the first being an old Ford Ranger which had a myriad of problems including a gas gauge that didn't work and gas tank that would only take gas at an extremely slow rate (very frustrating in the winter). So I'm used to cars that are a bit quirky. All I want is for it to get me to the pool and the hot tub.

I would have celebrated by driving about and picking up some sort of food or item that's usually hard for me to get, but I'd only had two hours of sleep. My dad brought the car here and then flew out to Albany at 6 am, meaning leaving here at 5, meaning up at 4:15, and we'd only gone to bed at 2. Sigh. Tiring. I was half hoping it would snow a lot so my dad would have to stay and visit with me. So I resisted getting a sausage biscuit from Tudor's (the best commercially available sausage biscuit ever) and came home to fall into a fitful rest.
filled character is so different, and so annoying.

Awake, if groggy, I flung myself into working on my Obelix cross-stitch piece. I should mention that I've never done a fully filled piece before. Mostly I just do text with smallish borders. After Obelix is finished I'll start on my Roman mosaic, much larger than Obelix and much more complex and easy to screw up. What can we do though? I can't do silly quotes forever. I have big cross-stitch dreams that make my hands ache just thinking about it. Obelix is coming along beautifully though, don't you think?

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.