shine on, shine on harvest moon...

My best African violet

The days have been long, but I've immersed myself in reading about Mao's 'Great Leap Forward' and the resulting massive famine and extreme leaps of stupidity. 

I think my creativity gene might just be on vacation. Or that colorfade has sapped everything from me. Maybe that's it, repetitive patterns are bad for the brain! That piece is almost done, as it the smaller green to blue with the same pattern. 

Tonight I started on piece from Leslie Wilkins' Traditional Blackwork Samplers. Then I messed it up and had to unpick an entire evening's work. Thank you, brain-dead Meredith. 

It's a good night to look at the moon. Why? Well, it's full and it's the Moon Festival tonight! So I stood at the open window and sang all the moon songs I know, quite loudly.  A lot of them are old 30s and 40s songs, so maybe some of the oldies in my building got a nice surprise.

Does working with Aida make you forget how to count?

Do you stare at the fabric, all the little squares, and immediately forget everything you meant to fix? Do you repeatedly count some segments? Does it cause you throw up your hands and give in to the mistakes? Do you slyly claim that the mistakes had to be made in deference to the Native American belief about such things?

Well, I do. It makes me crazy. I love needlework, absolutely love it. The problem is that there's too much to think of at once. With knitting you rarely have more than one thing to consider. Yeah there's counting rows sometimes and if you're doing Fair Isle there's more to think about but it's less work and there are typically large swatches of mindless knitting. I knit a lot of hats and I don't use a pattern so there's no counting and it's in the round so it's all knit stitch, no purl. I could do it in my sleep.

So here's a progress picture of my Victorian (or possibly earlier) rhyme about poor little Willy. I love how the border turned out but beyond that I am so frustrated. First the text was going to be too long (would screw up the border repeats) so I had to cut down the font to a less pretty version. Then the border spacing was still off so I had to cut the right side vertical border down by one square which my dad probably won't notice but would drive me to drink. Then after I had already pulled out the first few words I realized that although I'd fixed the border spacing I'd yet again forgotten to indent the text so it would be centered.

Well. Screw. That. I refused to go back and yank it again. It would not be centered and everyone would have to deal with it. I might do a small fiery design in the spaces after the first and third lines or a motif based on the border. Opinions? In any case, I would make it look great or I would go on a ruthless killing spree. Honestly, It's surprising that more serial killers aren't needleworkers.

Granted, my mind is foggy on the best of days. Between the pain and the way the disease eats my memory away I have a real problem focusing on details. Yet I have chosen to make cross-stitch and blackwork my new favorite hobbies. Obviously the RSD is eating away at my whole brain and not just my memory functions. Obviously I should return to plain freehand embroidery (as I have a niece on the way I'm sure I will at some point).

Why have I included a picture of adorable five year old me with my ten year old sister? Because I keep thinking about the new little niece my sister is growing and wondering how my nephew Benjamin will react to having a little sister. I hope (and believe) that he will love her like I love my sister. He's such a sweet, happy kid. A two year old who is able to understand that he needs to be extra gentle with me will be a good big brother, I think.

Okay, no, I just really wanted an excuse to show off how darned adorable I was! Beat THAT, new baby. Baby Meredith has the monopoly on cuteness. Forever!

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.

Babies and Garden Pests: Are they really so different?

Though I had done some embroidery before my sister became pregnant with her first baby it was that event which really propelled me into regular embroidery and from there into cross-stitch and blackwork.

My sister is my best friend, and has been since I was seventeen years old. She is five years older than me or I'm sure we would have been best friends even sooner than that. Of my eight nieces and nephews (this time next year it will be ten!), her son Benjamin (often called Bunny) is the only one I see regularly. I don't want kids myself and I've never been a baby-person, but the Bunny is the light of my life. He is two years old, and the happiest toddler I've known (knock on wood). He recognizes me and gives me unsolicited kisses, and I appreciate that.

Before he was born I embroidered a number of white onesies for him and just kept doing it as he grew. Now I've got three pieces that just kept being forgotten until he grew out of them, but luckily my sister is pregnant again so these, along with the smaller sizes, will be passed on to the new baby. I feel a little guilty since two of them are the best I've done, but Bunny got two sweaters I knit just for him and the new baby is unlikely to get a new sweater from me (sorry honey, hand-me-downs will be the name of the game for your whole life).

Here you find my favorite original embroidery pattern to date, a green and brown snail sliming along. I love the way the slime trail turned out with the two close shades of green and two stitch styles. What I will eventually add is a thicker line of darker brown next to the light brown of the shell, as it is too thin compared to the body. Otherwise, I love it! If I make another copy on regular fabric I will probably use metallic thread for the lighter green of the slime trail.

Hello Hello

My name is Meredith. I'm stuck at home most of the time due to a chronic pain disability. I love to do cross-stitch, embroidery, and blackwork and have been working at these arts for some time. Now I'm going to use this blog to post my own original patterns, motifs, and designs.

To start us off in grand fashion I present the conversion of a classic Roman image found in numerous mosaics into a cross-stitch pattern. It converted very well and I'm so happy with it.

Here is the original image, representing the fragility of life and the ease with which it can swing hard to a new direction. The scales and skull balance on the wheel of fortune or wheel of fate, the bags and cloth attempts to balance the whole works on the delicacy of the butterfly.


Now here is my pattern, made from the image. This mosaic is found numerous places with slightly differing versions. It is obviously in the public domain so feel free to use my pattern if you wish.

When I make this the entire background with be shades of teal (with only slight shade differences, the make it look a little weathered) but I have no filled in every single square because I'm lazy. It is the same with the bottom line which will all be that grey-brown color but again, lazyness.

The next classic/ancient image I hope to create a pattern for is a picture of Vercingetorix (king of the Gauls at the time of Julius Caesar's Gallic campaigns). Either just him alone or the much painted/sculpted image of him surrendering his arms to Caesar. I am beyond nerdy about ancient Rome, particularly during Caesar's time. I have always been a chatterbox, but the few times I spent more than five minutes not speaking in my childhood I was primarily engaged in imagining myself as a Roman centurion during the Gallic or British campaigns.

And now I get to express that happiness with thread and traditional techniques!