Watch Out, They Taste Curvy

One of my favorite things in comedy shows is when they put amusing posters in doctors' offices. They were especially skilled at this in the old show A Very Peculiar Practice (which I highly recommend, if you can find it).

There are also a few good posters in one episode of the Scottish show Still Game, which is about my favorite comedy ever, and that's where this piece comes from. It's completely insane and amazing, plus I love the Glaswegian slang.

Anyway, the point of this post is that this pattern is now for sale in my Etsy shop. Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair!

I am trying to keep up both a Facebook page and a Tumblr for my shop, so there are those links. Also, I'm looking for pictures of my patterns that other people have stitched, so if you fulfill that criteria please do send me a snap.

If I can wrangle up some more press then I'll be doing some contests and such soon.

Watch out!

One of my favorite things in TV shows is background jokes. In A Very Peculiar Practice the doctors offices are full of strange posters, one of which is, I think "How can another woman get you pregnant?" I notice these things and I love and adore them.

Still Game is one of my favorite shows ever. I about died when I first saw it. It's hilarious and it's geared to appeal to people in their thirties and older. It seems like in the US everything is geared toward teenagers and twenty-somethings.

Anyway, in one episode of Still Game (series 2 episode 3) there's a poster in the background that shows a picture of a banana with the words shown on my cross stitch piece. Hilarious! I crack up just thinking of it. I think my banana looks lovely. I used Andy Warhol's banana as a guide. Maybe I can sell it to a local restaurant or green grocer!

If anyone is interested in the banana pattern (or the entire pattern, really), just let me know and I'll send it to you or post it here if there's enough interest.

Hanging around again...

Between Easter and my birthday and my sister giving birth on a clinic floor things have been pretty crazy. I usually don't enjoy just sitting and watching TV shows but between the fatigue and stress I've been happy to sit back and watch a season of Jonathan Creek. 

You know what's sad about the modern age? You can't really have shows like MacGuyver or Jonathan Creek or those kinds of detective shows. It's all forensics and "Oh you can't tell it wasn't suicide because the angle of the shot to the head was wrong." The science ruins the story. It's all down to adapting Agatha Christie stories or other period things.

Anyway. This piece includes one of the ancestral mottoes. Dum spiro spero, which basically means "While I breathe I hope." It is generally attributed to Cicero, and who knows, he might have said it. He said a lot of good things, but he was also a sell-out coward. 

I include also the cutest brother + sister picture ever. My new niece was born April 20th and her name is Geneva (mostly called Evie) Lindsay. This makes ten nieces and nephews for me. My dad is hoping for one more so that he'll have had more grandchildren than his mother. He's silly like that.

Pastel, floral bastards...

I have finished my Still Game quote cross-stitch and it may be my most favorite piece so far! I love the colors, I love the borders, I love the font, and obviously I love the quote.

The only thing I'm not pleased with is the purple border above the quote. Initially it was just the lighter purple with the design left open. However, all the other borders use two colors and it started looking weird to me to have an odd one out. So I filled it in and it looks fine and all, I just think it looked better plain.

The first border below the quote turned out much lovelier than I first anticipated. I think it looks very old fashioned, like something my great-aunts would have done in the early 1940s. It is, however, one of those pain in the ass patterns. You can stitch it across without having to break and restart the thread at all, but you have to stitch in a very particular order and not lose concentration. Looks lovely though, doesn't it?

Bastardization of Tradition...

This is what I like most about cross-stitch - the combination of traditional borders/motifs and modern/snarky quotes. It's just so much fun. Plus, quotation pieces can be finished relatively quickly. From the moment I heard this line on the Scottish comedy Still Game I knew I wanted to stitch it.

I'm really pleased with the color combinations in this piece. There will be three different borders under the quote as well and I'm generally planning to use the same colors as in the top borders. The font is basically this half-uncial one with some alterations since I wanted more typical lowercase letters, I love how it turned out though.

I'm always amazed at how different something can look once it's stitched. The purple border ended up looking very argyle-ish, which I adore. I did learn something very vulnerable with this project though. Mainly that it is very difficult to stitch when your nose is leaking like a sieve. I have a bad cold/flu/thing that began with that super watery type of nose running where it just leaks out no matter what. I'm surprised I didn't get any on the project because I was still trying to stitch as much as possible. Now it's all about that typing of wracking cough that shakes your whole throat and some very questionably colored phlegm. Thank god for needlework, in any case.