Five Little Peppers...

Spent most of today asleep recovering from all the standing and cooking of Thanksgiving. Part of the way my body recovers when I'm ultra-sore is by passing out for most of a day even after a full night's sleep. I went to bed at midnight, woke up at 8:30, spent half an hour with my dad, and then fell back asleep until 3:30. I woke up every couple hours but fell asleep again almost immediately each time.

During the afternoon I worked on a pattern of the cover of the book Five Little Peppers and How They Grew by Margaret Sidney. It's an old children's book, originally published in 1881. The edition I have is an especially sweet one published in 1909. As soon as I saw the cover I knew I wanted to make a cross-stitch pattern of it.

I need to pick a new project to work on, but I'm too exhausted to think of it.

People: What Are They?

This is a question I often struggle with. People. Do they suck or do they rock? I suppose it depends on the day and your relation to them, but I'm a curmudgeonly old lady who's gotten a bit too particular over tea cups, books, and baking supplies.

Of course this has led me to believe that Jon Richardson is my ideal partner. I'm somewhat compulsive, I always know where my keys and purse are, I'm a bit particular but not super intense about it. The perfect mixture of his "putter" and "leaver" personality types. Plus he's handsome. Plus I am super awesome and quite a catch. Who could resist.

This piece of embroidery, which is probably still a work-in-progress, is a quote from The IT Crowd. Now, I much Black Books as it's a bit less reliant on stereotypes than The IT Crowd, but this is still a very funny show. I highly recommend it.

Black Books fan piece is fini!

Well here we are. Another day, another hand cramp. I did some minor grocery shopping with my mama and then she very kindly brought me lunch after her hair cut appointment. There's this great little restaurant right by apartment. They make gyros and reubens and fried eggplant sandwiches and all sorts of good things. My mom knows the people who own it and we give it more patronage than anywhere else in town.

So I finished my big piece with the Black Books quote and I must say it looks marvelous. I put the pattern up for sale in my Etsy shop and the border makes a good frame for all manner of quotes, quite long ones too if you use a more space-conscious font. In the next few days I'll be posting more patterns in my shop including a Miyazaki motif set, flower motif set, and the Chicks Before Dicks and Assumption is the Mother of All Fuck Ups patterns.

The weather is giving me problems. First it was difficult because it went from hot to chill too quickly, and now the heat oppresses me. Something about the pressure or I don't know what, affects me even when inside a well air-conditioned apartment. Unless it's about to rain it mainly just makes me tired. The kind of exhaustion that you just can't fight. Also my mom has my car while hers is getting repairs so even if I had the energy I couldn't go see my sister and her brood. I miss my nephew and how easy it is to be happy when I'm with him. He's my curly-headed angel and he loves his auntie, luckily for me.

One of those nights...

**I've made some progress on my current cross-stitch (and I've done a lot more since I took this picture), so here it is. Here's me rambling too. I'm having a bad night, and sometimes I need to get it off my chest.**

It's one of those nights where I would do anything to fend off sleep. Since I got sick I have a lot of nightmares. Some are weird, like nightmares about my plants dying; some are familiar, like the horrible driving dreams that I've had since I was nine or ten. I dream the brakes don't really work, that the gas and break pedal shift back and forth, that I'm driving from the back seat and can't see, that something serious happens and I don't notice compounding the problem. It's part of why I really didn't want to learn to drive in high school.

Then there are nightmares about my family. Last night I dreamed my dad got a really bad concussion, woke up scared and sweating. Add to it that I've had a number of prophetic dreams. I know that sounds crazy and new agey or whatever, but it's true. I've dreamed about people before I've met them, I've dreamed conversations that happen almost word for word, I dreamed the plot of the last Harry Potter book (that was creepy). So when I dream about my family being injured or dying it worries me. 

I dream about a girl I love so much it breaks my heart. I miss her more than I can say and I still dream about her a few times a week. It is painful and sometimes beautiful and generally heartbreaking. I write letters I can't send her, impossible dreams make it seem so easy but I feel my back up against a brick wall.

I'm rambling. It's one of those nights. One of those days really. I woke up early expecting to see my mother but she had her own plans. I'm bad with changing plans, so I rattled around my apartment, did a good bit of stitching, but felt restless and empty and unable to settle back into 'work.' So I reread some old books, silly cheap fiction, only I remembered that the first time I'd read this book was on a bus going to see that perfect girl. "The Only Girl in the World" in the fashion of Sherlock Holmes and Poirot, the best match for me but out of reach forever. It always comes back to that.

When I get my time machine I'm going back to being three years old. That picture was a good Easter. Plus I was adorable.

Black Books: Great Show or Greatest Show?

I talk a big game when it comes to hilarious British shows, because I grew up with them and now make it my mission to expose my lazy family to new ones. I still recall fondly the first time I saw Black Books, back when BBCAmerica actually showed funny shows and not just endless hours of Cash in the Attic and How Clean Is Your House (this was a couple years ago, so maybe they've gotten better again).

Black Books is possibly my favorite of them all, partially because I was assistant manager of a book store. I know everything there is to know about frustrating book store customers and how much it saps you of humanity. I also know a fair bit about drinking, especially when I worked in the bookstore as that was the heyday of the drunk fests that me, my sister, and her husband had.

So this is my first Black Books cross-stitch, but not the last. It's also a good excuse to rewatch lots of episodes to find other good quotes. 

Also, I'm almost done with my Hayao Miyazaki motif set and I can't wait to get it in my store. It yielded some super cute designs and I think it will be popular.

new projects

Well I decided to leave the Horsefeathers quote without the yellow filling in the center of the flowers. It just ended up looking odd. So that project is all done and I'll be moving on to something new.

My next big thing is a large cross-stitch project around a quote from the TV show Black Books (one of my favorites ever). The quote being "Don't make me get sick into my own scorn," which I've framed with a nice vintage border. I had to alter things a bit to make them symmetrical, but I that's par for the course.

The border and font are both from vintage patterns found on this website, which is about the best resource ever! The layout is a bit confusing because that square chart with the numbered links always stays at the top of the page, but you just have to scroll down to see the patterns. It's fun to explore even if you're not interested in stitching such things. So that's what I love this Thursday!

I also love Miyazaki movies and I'm trying to make a set of cross-stitch patterns around some of his characters and themes. Should be a challenge!