Veni, vidi, vici...

Well, my friends, it is finished. My biggest cross-stitch piece to date, my baby, my pride and joy Roman mosaic. Not to brag, but I think it is bloody fantastic. The background didn't take as long as feared, which is really also true of the whole project. Before I started it seemed a daunting thing, perhaps in part because it is from a piece of art which I absolutely adore so I was fearful of not doing it justice.

The background is done in a mixture of five different shades and I tried to make it so some sections had more grey, some had more dark green, some had more teal, etc... I wish pictures did it justice because the background colors and the half-stitching contrasting with the full cross stitches just looks brilliant.

Finishing it really energized me too and I've gotten a good start on my newest project. I hope to open up a second Etsy shop in a few months which will be solely needlework and needlework patterns. This new project might be a pattern that I'll eventually sell, though I'm not sure there will be enough interest. I should have a WIP picture of it to post tomorrow. I've also finished a cross-stitch Tintin pattern, which when finished may go to my toddler nephew who loves Tintin.

Here in Charleston we had a few days of clear, dry weather before snow came again. It just seems to accumulate so quickly these days! One minute the sun is out and a few hours later I'm going to bed and notice that there's two inches of snow on the ground. I finally have a car again after about five years of rarely driving and of course that means it's going to snow all the time. Because I haven't driven regularly in so long, and because other drivers are all crazy, I haven't been leaping at the chance to drive on snow covered roads.

On the upside I have been extremely productive lately. Cross-stitch, washing dishes, loads of cleaning, etc... It's especially amazing as yesterday I received my last Christmas present - a Kindle! I grew up libraries and have always loved the feel and smell of books as much as the reading of them, so I was never lusting for a Kindle (or for their effect on book stores and libraries). However, I just can't hold the books anymore and a Kindle means I can read more since I don't have to solely rely on audio books. It will take getting used to, but I think it will be a good addition to my life. I feel quite grand when I'm reading on it.

Over the Rubicon...

Well, I am Caesar and I am over the Rubicon now; on my way freedom and power and over the first hurdle. At least, that's where I am, figuratively, with my Roman mosaic cross-stitch piece.

I am not entirely satisfied with the colors on the right hand bundle, but it's the best I can do. Two skeins will look like they'll contrast nicely when you hold them next to each other, but stitched onto Aida they blend into the other. I had this trouble with my greys on the skull too, and there's just no solution. There are only so many colors of thread, and certainly only a fraction of that at my local Michael's where the colors are not organized in any way. If I were healthy I'd organize them myself.

In any case, even though I've crossed the Rubicon, turned legions into traitors, and made my position clear, there is still a long road ahead and Pompey doesn't fall easily. The entire background will be three shades of teal, interspersed at random. I'm going to see how it looks with half-stitches first and hope that it looks good since it will be a ton of work to do that entire background with cross stitches. My Obelix piece used half stitches for the menhir and the skin color and it looks just fine. On the mosaic it will also help the main design pop.

Christmas was Christmas and I had a perfect time with my dad, though tiring. It's not quite over yet though as my sister, her husband, and my nephew come down tomorrow and we'll exchange presents then. I got to show my dad lots of the Scottish TV show Still Game though, where it turns out I understand the Glaswegian accent better than he does. He loved it though and we watched a few other things too, including the two Discworld two-part programs based on The Color of Magic and the Hogfather (the latter being the poorer, I feel, for having missed the mark on a few characters).

Now I'm making a much-needed grocery list and letting some peanut butter caramel corn cool off (and trying not to eat it all before my sister and her troupe get here).

Plunging Back into Ancient Rome

Well, after distracting myself with the Christmas blackwork I've been working on my Roman mosaic piece again. It's such a daunting project. I'm thinking about doing the teal background in half-stitches to save some time and thread, not to mention my hands.

I really love the way it's turning out though. Granted, working from a mosaic makes it easier and makes it easy to be pleased with the result since it's similar in style to the original. Still, I am beyond chuffed with myself at how lovely the left rag bundle is. The colors are perfect and after I finish the scarfy bit I can move on to the butterfly and the wheel. I'm trying to work from left to right for some reason I can't remember.

This is a good time for needlework because it is a strange Christmas for me and I like the distraction. I didn't grow up with any real religion, I assumed Christians viewed the Bible and God the same way we viewed Greek mythology in school. Still, Christmas was always such a big, wonderful thing in our house. I assumed a lot of things as a child that I never asked anyone about. When you have four older siblings and a dad who often give you random silly answers like Calvin's dad in Calvin and Hobbes then I think it inhibits your question-asking drive.

So I assumed things, like that sit-coms were real families being recorded and that all families are recorded and turned into sit-coms in other countries and beamed out to space. I'm fairly certain that belief was re-enforced by a particular episode of ALF (which is STILL a totally awesome show).

Anyway, this Christmas day will be different because my mom works all day (and I mean ALL day 4:30 am to 5 pm). I didn't want to leave her alone so I'm staying here. Hopefully my dad will come spend Christmas day with me and then we can go up to my sister's house or she can come down here. It's strange though. My mom works for an airline, so if it's snowy she'll have to stay late. The best possible circumstance is getting to see her for an hour or two after she finishes work.

I've never not been with my family on Christmas day. Being at this point twenty-five years old it may be fairly impressive that I've always gotten to be with my mom and sister on Christmas day, other people are away at school or whatnot. Luckily I just received my whiskey stones (so you can drink chilled whiskey without watering it down) and I have some very fine wheat whiskey that my aunt and uncle sent me.

Also luckily, I have needlework, the ultimate distraction.

Progress, Progress, Progress

Despite an initial setback (some mistake that I can't even find) my Roman mosaic cross-stitch is going well. I've finished a good portion of the skull now, though it's less than I'm letting myself imagine since I'm filling in all the white squares with white thread. I just needed more work to do. Oh, and I'm crazy and apparently have a desire to have constantly aching eyes and hands.

On the side I've finished the pattern for a blackwork piece for my dad. It's hard to look at because I've changed several aspects but I like the main border I've chosen and really like the font. I'm doing two smaller borders on top (and bottom) of the main one (four or five squares high) and then a taller more eleborate border on top of that. The elaborate outermost borders on the top and bottom with have some color worked in, while the rest of the borders will be dark green and the text with be black.

My intent is to have it be sampler-ish. The quote is an old rhyme, Victorian, I believe, but possibly older than that. So in my head I can imagine women then using common rhymes as text for samplers and then filling the rest with border and motif practice and such. I also need to start work on a traditional family sampler thing for my sister and her family. You know, the classic names and dates of birth and such.

The picture is a bit all over but for the rhyme I'm doing the first two borders (top and bottom) and the fourth border. I got carried away and was trying to make it a square piece but gave up on that because my eyes were going really bleary. I was initially doing the dot/slash on the "i" but it was making the spacing weird in a few spaces so I decided to drop it (but didn't feel like going back and erasing it). I really think the font fits the quote.

The borders are from Lesley Wilkins Traditional Blackwork Samplers and the font is adapted from one in that book. The corner piece and border on the vertical side is my adaptation of the horizontal one. I especially like how the corner piece came out, though I ended up having to drop it so the spacing will work out correctly.

Slowly but Happily

I started work on my Roman mosaic cross-stitch piece the other day and am moving along slowly, but happily.

Why not slowly but surely? Because surety is not as important as keeping cross-stitching a happy hobby for me. I am disabled and unable to work, therefore I have a lot of hours I can embroidery each day. However, doing hours and hours each day eventually starts to feel like work (hence one reason why I've been taking a break from knitting).

With such a big, complex piece of needlework the chance of getting burnt out and sick of the project is even higher. I'm trying to keep a smaller project around to work on at the same time when I need a less taxing bit of work and am also trying to make some new patterns (Tintin and Captain Haddock are in the works). I have a Felix the Cat pattern I made but that might be a little too boring since he's all-black.

The last couple days I haven't done any work on the mosaic as my sister and nephew have been visiting. Yesterday my nephew said my name for the first time! He's connected my name to me for six months or more but this past month he's started vocalizing first granny, grandpa, and now me! He's such a sweetheart (25 months old now) and is really the light of my life. My sister is also currently pregnant with their second, due in early May, and we just found out it will be a girl! So then I'll have two lights of my life (and they're moving down here soon so I'll get to see them all the time)!

I'm also working up a blackwork pattern focused around this rather old rhyme which my dad loves:

Little Willy in the best of sashes
Fell in the fire and was burnt to ashes
By and by the room grew chilly
For no one liked to poke up Willy

Buckling down for the good of all...

Well my last post must have been a bit cathartic because I buckled down and finished the cursed piece. It's not like there was much left to do, but it was all annoying because there were various corners that needed five or six stitches only. If they'd needed twenty stitches I wouldn't mind but a mere five or six is just...frustrating.

I even worked on it while hanging out with my sweet and maddeningly adorable nephew Benjamin. He's two years old and very into letters and numbers. He knows the whole alphabet and numbers up to twelve (and a few random teen number and maybe twenty, I forget) and whenever he sees words or numbers he likes to point them out. It makes it dangerous to do cross-stitch around him, given that toddlers are well-known to often have sticky, messy fingers, but I risked it. The phrase "This is a no-touch item," was oft repeated.

Of course, I may have rushed into this a little too heedlessly. Now all I have on the books is the big, complex Roman mosaic - a piece which alternately frightens and enlivens me. I am excited to do it, but I'm so scared of messing it up to the point where it must be scrapped.

The other day I made a Felix the Cat cross-stitch pattern and I'd like to do a Tintin piece for my nephew. My sister has a mug with Captain Haddock on it and a little picture of Tintin on the bottom, this has led young Benjamin to point to the bottom of all dishware, and pretty much anything he can pick up, and say "Tintin!" He has a dutch Tintin counting book which he absolutely adores.

As this is the formerly-cursed piece, I do absolutely love how it turned out. While the border was fussy and frustrating I think it looks wonderful and the greens are close enough in shade to not distract from the text yet distinct enough to make the mosaic pattern shine. Again, I adore my little snakes and mice, especially the mice, and I believe I'll try to work the basic design into a blackwork sampler featuring various animals.

Projects Lost in Time

With cross-stitch I have been immensely efficient. I have only once started a new project while the previous one remains unfinished and typically finish my projects in one to two days. I just sit there listening to my books on tape, doggedly stitching until a) it's finished or b) I can't move my hands (at which point I take a break for an hour or two and then take it back up). I am not so disciplined with knitting, I'm afraid.

However, there is a cross-stitch project which I started, designed an annoyingly wide and complex border for, and then proceeded to screw it all up. The text is fine and used a a font I designed myself, but it was a long quote, longer than I've done before and thus requiring a larger border. The quote, by the way, is from the TV show Better Off Ted, which is the funniest thing any network has come out with in one, maybe two, decades. Sadly it only lasted two seasons but both are available on Netflix instant viewing, and I highly recommend it.
Most of the border is a geometric pattern done in two fairly close shades of green. On the horizontal parts I added some animals that related to the quote in order to break up the monotony of the main border (and to make sure I had enough green for the rest). I also added some smaller blackwork letters in the lower border that include the last line of the quote (which isn't completely necessary but helps if you're unfamiliar with the quote).

Because of these additions I needed to stitch the bottom two lines of the border and the top two and then fill things in. On the bottom I did the bottom three lines without thinking and had to ripe them out. Then I noticed a problem in one of the corner bits, which was glaring to me though my mom couldn't really tell even when I'd pointed it out.

I am a perfectionist. I love symmetry, I love perfect spacing. Stuff like this makes me see red - not so much the finding of problems but having to rip out my stitches and do it all again. With the lower border I couldn't even reuse the thread, it was entangled with the other green color so I had to take it out with a seam-ripper (and my seam-ripper is crappy). Since then I have been loathe to pick up the project again. There's really not much left to do but it's like the whole thing has become a bit of bad luck. I've completed two projects since setting the cursed one down and started a new one to boot.

Here it is so far. I am going to try to start it again, though first I need to make sure I have the text completely worked out so I don't end up completely off-center and needing to do THAT again too. Sigh. It's my first real problem project (though I think the Roman mosaic will end up with a lot of frogging and re-stitching) and oh how I hate it, but I might hate it sitting there unfinished and looking at me even more.

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!