Royal Winton Queen Anne - Finished!

Today is an historic day. I have finished my chintz napkin. There are a few little things I might go in and add/fix, but it's pretty damn finished and that's the main thing.

After months of working on and off, horrible hand cramps, unfocusing eyes, pricked fingers and bouts of swearing, I'll never need to stitch that damn pattern again.

If you'd like to stitch it just contact me for the pattern. It's easy enough to get from the china, but mine is already finished and in a handy .jpg file so I'm happy to share.

Now I can rest and get some good laziness in before the next project!

lots of little stitches

Well I'm about a third of the way through my chintz napkin! It's going much faster than I'd thought it would, which is generally the way with all of my larger projects.

I think as my 'break' project, for when I get tired of no frame and tiny stitches, I'll finally stitch my Liverpool pattern. I'm going to do it on 22 ct. Aida though, so it goes more quickly and won't use up so much thread. 

In a bit over a week I'll be at the beach with Madre for our timeshare week. Lately I've been so tired and run down and anti-social that it can't come too soon. It will be a relief to get away from this apartment and this city.

blinding progress

I am slightly kicking myself for deciding that doing a chintz napkin to match the chintz cup was a good idea. This is SUCH a frustrating pattern, because of all the tiny bits of one color spread out in a way that makes it difficult to keep at all organized.

It is going well though and it will be amazingly gorgeous when I'm finished. That's some consolation.

I've been posting some older patterns in my Etsy shop. You can now find the Moody Bastarditis pattern, Not Dumb Luck, Dumb Skill, Reality Continues to Ruin My Life, Never Bored When I Am Present, and Captain Haddock (though those last two are quite new, of course).

The shop has been more successful than I ever dreamed and it makes me really happy that other people actually want to stitch my patterns. I'm going to start work on a "Living in Sin" pattern with a super traditional border. It will give me something less frustrating to work on when I get sick of the chintz napkin.

Oh, if anyone would like the pattern for the Royal Winton Queen Anne chintz, just let me know and I'll send it to you. It's easy enough to make yourself but is tedious and annoying.

yet again...

This is a hard time of year for me. First it's my nephew's birthday, then my sister's, then my brother-in-law's, then Thanksgiving. After that it's clear sailing though, since I've had all my Christmas shopping done for ages.

I've been being really productive and doing actually useful things, so of course the embroidery suffers. Really it's a good thing though as I needed to clean out my fridge and get a new dresser and all that.

What I'm super excited about is having bought the best tea cup ever! It's the Royal Winton Queen Anne chintz design which is a cross-stitch pattern basically. How cool is that? I can't wait to the do the matching tea napkin.

There are new patterns in my Etsy store and I'm hoping to start an Uncle Scrooge quote for my dad for Christmas. My brain is so sick of working on patterns on the computer though. 

Instead I'm burying myself in True Stories of the Great War a collection of stories/articles edited by Francis Trevelyan Miller. When you read the titles you have to say them around in a very dramatic newsreel voice. Titles such as "Tales of the Daring Rides of a French Trooper" and "What the Kaiser's Son Saw on the Battlefield." I am utterly mad for that kind of thing. It's usually interesting but also makes me giggle.

tea cups and the Vicar

All right, folks, I am now up to four embroidered matchy-matchy tea napkins! That means I can now have a very gloating and prideful tea party. I'm not sure which tea cup pattern to work on next, the others that I want to do are a bit more difficult to translate to cross-stitch so I'm nervous about starting them. Though I have a lovely geometric teacup that would be really easy to do, so I might do that one next.

Otherwise I started work on my first quote from the show The Vicar of Dibley: "revolting old soak." I did the text in an uncial font which adds a certain something. I'm not really sure whether I want to add a border or not. We'll see.

I think I have reverse SAD. I much prefer winter for many reasons, and it being crazy bright out until 8:30 or later is just getting on my nerves. I keep looking at how light it is and grumbling to myself about it. Blugh.

Great website find!

So I had to reformat my computer and my good graph paper file was accidentally lost. In searching the internet I found this awesome site where you can specify the size of paper and square size and even the color of the lines. It spits out a pdf file which you can save and then use in Photoshop or Gimp or convert to JPGS or whatnot. 

It's a great tool for those of you creating counted embroidery patterns. Check it out: http://incompetech.com/graphpaper/plain/

I finished another tea napkin cross-stitch! It's a small one so I might actually add a second flower in red just to give it a bit more life and busyness.

Things I love Thursday

Technically it's Friday now but I fell asleep for most of the day.

Tea cups. I adore tea cups and collect them. Not full sets, just individual lovely tea cups. My mom just got me a new one today, in order of us putting up a third shelf for my tea things. The picture is my new tea cup!

Carl Barks. Fantagraphics is publishing the Carl Barks library in installments (or at least what he wrote for Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge). The first one comes out in October and I'm actually thinking of pre-ordering it, something I never do. I can't wait though. I grew up with Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge comics, mostly the ones by Barks and Don Rosa. When Rosa's "Life and Times of Uncle Scrooge" came out my dad and I would go to the grocery store every month and buy the new issue in the series and then read it aloud together. It's one of my favorite memories.

Rose tea napkin

Finally finished my rose tea napkin. It matches the tea cup very well, especially in terms of the colors. Nice to have two of the napkins done and it's sort of upped my excitement about working on the other napkins.

The custom piece is coming along really well and I can't wait to show it off. I used a few different motifs from the French book Repertoire des Motifs (which I wish to god I could find somewhere, all I have are some bad scans) and combined them to make a circular border around the text. The best part is that I managed to make it perfectly symmetrical. I get a little obsessed with symmetry so I spent the better part of a few hours working on this relatively small border. But it IS symmetrical! So worth it.


You know who I love? Ed Byrne! He looks a bit like an ex of mine, but he's so funny that I overlook it. I highly recommend checking out his shows. I personally love hearing him and Dara O Briain talk. They can talk about anything, it pleases me to listen.

Roses are pink...

I've finished making the pattern for the second tea cup napkin. It will match the teacup shown, which is an easier design to match than the first effort was. I've basically finished picking out which tea cups to stitch and I'd like to get all the patterns made up before I start stitching more. 

There are more commercial pieces that I should really work on. I've been restless in general. My kitchen is in an awful state and I've been watching too much TV. Too many things I don't want to think about. On the plus side my lemons are slowly getting bigger and the new blossoms will start popping in five days or so (and there are a MILLION of them!).

I have a number of quotes I'm choosing from for my next piece, but I think I'll skip back to non-counted embroidery for long enough to do my St. Trinian's tribute piece. It will have one of the images of a field hockey player along with the words "With hockey sticks and balls of steel, we are St. Trinian's!" Love it! Otherwise I'm leaning toward some sort of snarky quote. Or something. And here's a picture of one of my first cross-stitch/blackwork projects! It's a phrase my sister and I came up with (and still use often).

The Tea Cup Project has begun!

Well I've begun a project I've been thinking about for about a month. While at the beach my mom found me some lovely fancy tea napkins that are an even-weave fabric. I myself collect tea cups so I thought a fun project would be to do up cross-stitch designs of the motifs on my tea cups so that I have a matching napkin to go with the.

This would obviously be a closer likeness if I were doing non-counted embroidery but I said "Oh but the fabric is so tight and the stitches will be soo tiny..." This was a mistake. I am now going blind. Those stitches are teensy! They're like a millimeter and a half across! On the other hand, I really like the overall effect. It looks nothing like the design on the tea pot but the colors are all there, it shows there's greenery as well as flowers and includes the little bit of pink on the cups. I also love how the pattern generally looks (which is good given that I created it myself).

So now I'm torn. I don't like mismatching things so having one cross-stitched napkin and the rest in free embroidery doesn't appeal. However, doing seven more napkins of these damn tiny stitches doesn't appeal either. I will be getting a better spot lamp soon and possibly a magnifying glass of some sort as well so hopefully that helps with the aching eyes. I'll also be getting an eye exam to check to see if my eyes have gotten worse. After that, new birthday glasses from Zenni! Yea!