Pain

 My legs have been in more pain than usual for a while and not my upper body has joined them in this shameless mutiny. I am getting very close to the end of my tether.

I super messy stitched a quote from a Leonard Cohen poem onto a handkerchief. We'll call it pain-stitching, which you do just to be stitching something anything, just for that focus it provides. If I can focus worse pain into just my hands it's easier to cope for a bit, but there's a limit.


Right now I am knitting a Clanger. I will eventually make two, one for my niece and one for my nephew. They're extra big, since I just kind knit with size two needles. Size five is pushing it already. 

Hoping I can take a bath at Madre's tonight which will maybe help? Who knows. My body is an evil unto itself.

apologies for absence

I did finally finished my opera blackwork piece (and all ink black!) and I know what project I'm doing next. The opera piece was hard to finish because of border difficulties. Just designing opera motifs that weren't too large was a challenge and I didn't think there was enough room to do a border on the top. I like my solution though and I love my champagne glasses and especially that skull! Ever tried to design a small blackwork skull? It's damned hard!

It's also apartment inspection time (I live in subsidized housing) so I've been busy cleaning as much as I can. Plus today was my mom's birthday. My sister and the fat baby came over and we had tea and lunch and gave my mom her presents. I held Miss Evie for a while and bounced her around, being rewarded with some giggles and smiles. She's in a fussy stage though and my poor cat spent the whole time terrified under the couch and now won't deign to look at me.

a fine day for sailing

So Go Sailor is happy, snappy, bubblegummish sort of band with some lyrics that have sinister tones. I like that in my music. It's like my needlework, traditional and sweet but with sinister/snarky quotes. Really that's basically me in a nut shell. So sweet and young looking (people mostly assume I'm no older than 19) but also a bit sinister.

Granted when I showed this piece to my mother she just sort of made a noise and gave me a look, but being a sinister young lady I'm used to that. Instead of selling this piece it will go into my bank of items for my eventual perfectly decorated dressing room. You know, for when I have a dressing room. It will be in the grand Addams Family style of things.

I also finished my cross stitch pattern of the Liverpool Football Club crest thingy. It's not the full huge giant affair with torches and the "you'll never walk alone" nonsense, just the basic shield design and founding date. I don't have any particular reason to support Liverpool but my dad always did, so I always do. Anyway, the pattern will be up in my store in the next few days.

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.