The Fashion Club

My pattern for the Fashion Club is now for sale in a set with the Daria, Jane, and Trent pattern. 

I accidentally outlined the stripe on Sandy's shirt and forgot the yellow on Stacy's braids before I took a picture, but oh well. My embroidery will probably never be absolutely perfect. Oh there are some pieces with no real mistakes, but where I've changed the pattern to make it nicer. My brain will always tend to sloppiness, I think. 

When I worked full time, and when I was a dish crew leader at boarding school, then I paid strict attention and worked very hard, because someone else was counting on me. When it's just me, though, and just a way to keep busy and pay for supplies, that's different.

Daria, Jane, and Trent

My pattern of Daria, Jane, and Trent is now for sale in my Etsy shop. I think it turned out quite well, though the magic of backstitch decided "We'll twist these stitches just enough to make Daria look happy!" The universe has a funny sense of humor.

I'm already at work on the Fashion club stitching, and maybe a quarter of the way done already. It will eventually be one big group listing.

I've been so tired in the afternoons lately that I've gotten nothing done because I start falling asleep while I'm stitching. My instinct then is to get up and make lunch because that's involved enough that it wakes me up. I'm very much against napping, since I always feel dreadful or confused when I wake up from one. It's weird though, because sometimes I still can't fall asleep until late, despite barely making it through the afternoon.

You're Standing On My Neck

This is my new project, Daria sprites or 8-bits or whatever they're called. This is a WIP picture, with just the outlining left and the text. 

I've also completed the patterns for the Fashion Club and will be doing Jake and Helen as well. There will be three separate patterns, each with quotes, but sold as a set. I'd like to do Britney, Kevin, Jodie and Mac as well, but I think they'll be much harder to do and I'm quite lazy. Stacy's braids were bad enough!

The quote under the Fashion Club obviously has to be "It's cute, but not too cute."

A'th'Cheat

This pattern will be up for sale in my Etsy shop soon. It comes with not one, but two fancy full square borders. Both say "Yeah man, I'll gnaw your face off," along the tops and bottom. The first's pillars with Cheat spots and the second's have some of his many alter-egos. 

I've also created a Homsar pattern that I have yet to stitch, and have gotten a fair bit done on my napkin. I think it will be done in another couple of days. 

For now the napkin has started to put me to sleep, so I've been working on possibly my favorite pattern design ever. Details soon!

Oh, I'm also trying to start a Facebook account and Tumblr account for my store. Both will include information new patterns, contests, notifications of store sales, and pieces by other talented needleworkers. Only bear with me, I can only slightly navigate Facebook.

If you've stitched any of my patterns, please send me a picture of it!

Finished!

Well here is Tintin, all finished. I think it turned out absolutely beautifully.

It's a bit hard to decide what to do with it, since my siblings and I all grew up with Tintin comics and my nephew Benjamin loves Tintin as well. Benjamin isn't really in a position to appreciate art though. I will probably end up selling this, just because I've already embroidered Christmas presents for most of my family.

I'm really a bit proud of the pattern though. The only thing I don't like is the left side of the spotlight. It looks a little odd/flat because of Tintin being in the way. I'm sure it's fine and Madre would scoff at me for thinking about it but that's just the way I am.

Now it's time to come up with the next project. I think I need something snarky and adult to keep up my subversive credibility.

Massive Tintin progress

So here's quite a lot of progress on Tintin. The spotlight improved the piece amazingly and the black is looking great. The full cross stitches around the leg (and around Snowy) still show up very well even in the sea of black half-stitches, which had been my main worry.

The only thing I don't like is that now the shadow stitches look a lot lighter, but that's a pretty small complaint. There's a lot of black to fill in but it's going more quickly than I expected (though that's true of pretty much every project).

Tintin!

I grew up with Tintin and Asterix comics, and while Asterix will always be my favorite, I'm very attached to Tintin. We had some of the Tintin cartoons too, which I adored.

So here's my Tintin-in-progress. It will be just like my base image (just without the black fill background. I think I need to get a lighter skin tone though and also need to look for a good color for his hair, so the project is on hold for a bit. I think it's a really good translation from my base image to the cross stitch though!

Now I'm trying to design a pattern of the Grateful Dead logo from the Steal Your Face album. With Christmas coming a lot of the things I'm stitching either can't be posted here (since they're presents) or are so obscure that I don't think you guys would enjoy them. I did design a fabulous blackwork ax though, so if anyone needs an ax design, just ask!

I'm desperately hoping that I won't have to turn the AC on again this season, but it's hard to say. Sometimes it's still pretty warm during the day. All my plants are inside though and I've rearranged some of my succulents. These days my only non-succulents are my lemon tree and a lone African violet. Oh, and the cat grass but that doesn't really count.

Tougher than the toughies and sharper than the sharpies

There are few things I love more than Uncle Scrooge and Donald Duck comics, particularly those by Carl Barks and Don Rosa. Obviously Carl Barks duck comics are amazing but Don Rosa is maybe even more special to me. Barks' comics that we had belonged to everyone, they were bought for my brothers and I got the ones still in readable conditions when I was old enough. Rosa's comics on the other hand were sometimes bought new just for me. For the youngest of five children that's a fairly rare occurrence.

So anyway, here's my first Uncle Scrooge embroidery piece. Scrooge's general motto was that he'd be "tougher than the toughies and sharper than the sharpies, and make his money square." In the design I had to include his number one dime and his money bin. 

We finally got a break in the ultra-hot, ultra-humid weather with a couple slightly cooler days. If it were completely overcast it would be perfect for me. I really can't be out in the sun at all, it hurts my skin almost immediately, so even if it's a fairly pleasant day it's hard for me to be outside. I'll be much happier come the end of September, which is hopefully when Madre and I will go camping. Love being out in the woods. I can't go hiking anymore but I can lie in a hammock and look at the leaves and feel a bit more peaceful.

summer is evil

Summer is just not my time. Winter can be hard but summer is just brutal. Yesterday though I threw up my hands in protest and went to the Clay Center (local art/science museum) with my mom and my nephew Benjamin. It was so much fun to see him play in a different environment and he was generally quite good.

He also came to my apartment for the first time. He mostly just walked around in awe and listed everything as "Auntie Moo's picture," "Auntie Moo's TV," "Auntie Moo's clock," etc... He was SO good though. I have a ton of stuff at his level that I don't want him to touch but he was good about not grabbing and leaving things alone when I asked him too. It also helps that I put out some toys right at his level so he saw them right away. 

Once they left I went into healing sleep mode for about five hours, had a horrible nightmare, and then stayed up until 5 am. It was actually kind of a half-horrible nightmare. Part was just awful, and part was great (I was playing soccer, most of my dreams I'm in pain, just as I am, but sometimes I get a break).

In any case, I couldn't get a great picture of my Bullwinkle quote blackwork piece, and I noticed a few missing stitches (now remedied), but I absolutely love how this turned out. In person it's so so much more beautiful. I also just love that quote. that quote definitely summed me up as a kid and adolescent.

I've also got a great new piece using a Billy Bragg lyric. I came up with a gorgeous border that reminds me of traditional star motifs in quilting which I'll be utilizing in a purely non-textual piece soon.

Ron Stoppable would be my best friend ever

So it's another Kim Possible piece! This is a quote from my boy Ron Stoppable. It's not like you have to know the show to find the quote amusing though - I try to always choose text that can be enjoyed and understood but anyone rather than a specific in-joke.

This is one of my favorite lines in the whole series (closely followed by "time travel: a cornucopia of disturbing concepts"). The border is from the book Repertoire des Motifs and while not completely symmetrical it's not bad. I do quite love the way it turned out in fact.


The flowers are a dark purple, easily distinguishable from the black text in real life but showing up much darker in picture (and who knows when the sun will really be out again in Charleston).

Please and thank you!

So there are a few things I especially adore in this world (okay, many MANY things) but as far as TV shows one of my favorites is the cartoon Kim Possible. It's one of those perfect cartoons that has a lot of adult references and humor in addition to the usual stuff. It's also just genuinely hilarious and I relate a lot to the bumbling sidekick character, Ron, as he's my twinsy.

Anyway, one of the commonly said phrases in the show is "please and thank you" so I thought I'd embroider it on a tea towel.

I know most people don't like this kind of rough free-handed cursive but I love it. Something in the simplicity and roughness pleases me greatly.

Now I'm working on another Kim Possible quote in cross-stitch with a gorgeous floral border: "not dumb luck, dumb skill."

Did a bit of stitching on a new project (a gift for someone who knows about this blog so I'm not going to post it) but mostly I've just rested today. Yesterday was extremely tiring but fun as well.

I finally got my sister to watch at least the first half of the St. Trinian's movie with me and had a wonderful time with my nephew when he woke up from his nap. My sister, Kyla, is due with her second baby in only a month and a half! I can't wait to see my niece in the onesies I've embroidered for her.

As for Hardcore StitchCorps, I posted listings for the patterns for my fox face and owl face (reproduced here) yesterday. Today I finally got the pattern for the raccoon worked out and printed. Once I get him stitched up I'll be posting the three patterns as one listing as well for a two for three deal. I'm thinking about doing another series of animal faces. My idea is to do a simple quilt with five inch square pieces in different colors with embroidered squares featuring the animals mixed in. Simple, cute, personal touch, etc...

I'm afraid I'm being utterly lazy. I got through six episodes of Upstairs Downstairs. Madre and I are prepping to watch the new Upstairs Downstairs that they've been making. I love the old show so much. Certain episodes stick in my mind SO well. The first episode I ever saw was the Titanic once and it just hit me so hard.

What didn't work out so well is the movie they made of the Terry Pratchett novel Going Postal. It is one of my very favorite Discworld books and the movie was okay and probably quite good if you'd never read the book. They somehow managed to remove all the singularly Pratchetty details. Quite depressing. David Suchet was in it which was crazy because I've only seem him as Poirot. The casting was lovely but the script writer was a fool, the operation was a success but the patient died. C'est la guerre.

Whenever he gets in a fix...

I am too tired to think of anything much to say. My brain and my body are just frazzled.

In any case, here is the finished Felix the Cat. I should have included his bag of tricks, I guess, but thinking on it now the pattern wouldn't be fun to design and wouldn't be fun to stitch either. C'est la guerre.

Lethargy and Movies

I generally spend a lot of time reading and listening to audio books while I stitch. I usually average between ten and fourteen books read per month and I enjoy that. However, there have been so many mediocre books in my life lately that I only read five books in February. There were a lot of factors but the biggest is a prevailing blahness.

We all have cycles and mine is one of bravely coping in a cheerful Pollyanna way which can suddenly turn to lethargy and the desire to watch whole seasons of TV shows in quick succession. I still keep stitching and knitting and whatnot but I don't have the patience to read mediocre books. I've run out of books by my longer series authors (Rex Stout primarily) and have a hot yen for history but all the books I think sound good I can't find on audio. Tres frustrating. Time for another Pratchett I guess, though I'm trying to pace myself and not run out of Discworlds any time soon.

So tonight I worked on my Celtic style B (an eventual gift for my nephew Benjamin, well, for his parents really) and watched the recent St. Trinian's remake. I knew the English did a series of St. Trinian's moves in the 1950s but decided it would be a bad idea to watch them. I grew up with St. Trinian's, first reading it when I was about eight years old. And then of course I went to a boarding school and played field hockey which increased my love for the comics.

When I saw they did a remake in 2007 I got it but put off watching it, fearing what they'd done to my beloved comic. Finally broke down and watched it tonight and it was PERFECT! I knew from the opening that they'd done well by old Ronald Searle and I'm so glad the English are still all over the good things in life. They did a second one in 2009 which I'll watch soon. It was the perfect mood lifter too! I've been wanting to do a St. Trinian's embroidery and I think I'll work on the pattern soon.

I found some black thread hiding under another work-in-progress (just a short length which I'd misplaced some days ago) so I did a little more on Felix the Cat, worked on Frida's vines and the Celtic B (picture tomorrow), and framed and shipped out my Roman mosaic piece. It's the first needlework piece that I've sold and you know I'm so proud of it. I'm glad it will get to be seen but also glad it went to a friend.

The Wonderful Wonderful Cat...

Why yes, I did begin work on my Felix the Cat pattern! I'm proud of this pattern. I loved Felix the Cat cartoons when I was a kid and I still quite enjoy it.

I charted this pattern ages ago but there have been so many things to work on. I am slightly OCD and needlework for me is a godsend. It is involved and perfectionistic and I can either be stitching or coming up with patterns or blathering about them on a blog. Three activities springing from one hobby, it's brilliant.

I thought I'd just take a break from Frida to work on Felix and then ran completely out of black thread. Having just come back from a long car trip (which really destroys me) with a sinus infection (or something quite like it) tagging along, I am knackered. Absolutely knackered. So driving way out to Michael's on a weekend when the area is packed with shoppers is not my idea of fun. I have to go out tomorrow though to pick up the mat for the Roman mosaic which I sold to a friend of mine. That's the last time I stitched something in an odd side, I'll tell you.

In any case, here is my progress on Felix. I suppose I could have gone in and done the white backstitching on the head and hands but my brain didn't realize that. Actually it took some hours to realize I could at least do the red tongue. Stephen Fry told me on his quizish panel game QI that if you block the left nostril your spatial and visual intelligence increases and if you block the right nostril your verbal abilities increase. So given that both nostrils and my entire sinus cavity feels as though someone filled it with caulk I will attribute my slow-mindedness to that.

Thank you Mr. Fry for the brilliant excuse, PS please ask David Mitchell to marry me as I'm quite lovely, enjoy history, and generally think everyone around me has been struck with madness.

Puke-a-tronic!

Sometimes there are odd, often made-up, words that strike you as the best thing ever. Puke-a-tronic (as spoken by Amy in Futurama) is one of mine. There are real words that do that too of course, like pettifoggery. Pettifoggery is one of those words that you never need to know the definition of to understand what it means. I enjoy words like that.

I woke up after having a nightmare about being in an electric wheelchair that wouldn't stop and just kept going faster and faster. I was in a Sam's Club type of store and yelling at the clerks who all just stared at me and ignored me. Then when the batteries died I went and asked one clerk if he'd heard me and he just shrugged that he had but it hadn't seemed important. I was storming off to demand the firing of about seven clerks when I woke up.

Patterns for the New Year

Well, there's been great progress with my Roman mosaic. I've got over half of the background finished and only a tiny bit of the brown ground area at the bottom left to do. That's the trouble with not having a needlework frame yet - the bottom of anything is especially hard on my hands. After that I just have the white parts of the skull to do, which I've smartly saved for last so it doesn't get stained.

I was working on the mosaic while visiting with my nephew, Benjamin, kept pointing to the skull and saying "Daddy" while giggling. I love the toddler sense of humour. If you misunderstand whatever he's saying (I'm not good at understanding toddler-speak) and repeat back the wrong word he thinks it's hilaaarious.

Anyway, I thought I'd post some patterns. One I've stitched already and one I haven't (but it will be my next quick project). This first one was inspired by a Cake Wrecks post making fun of the way teenagers talk. This particular phrase struck me as hilarious so I stitched it. Only in the pattern I've corrected all the mistakes I made and done some other changes to make it generally more attractive.

The next is a Felix the Cat cross-stitch pattern. I haven't filled in all the black because that's so annoying and boring but I've filled it in around where you'll need to do a little white stitching to show that he has two legs and fingers and all. I think it will look nice when stitched, in any case, and hopefully there are some other stitchers out there who grew up watching (and adoring) Felix cartoons.

There's only really a specific group of Felix cartoons I really like though. I love the early early Felix and I love what I *think* is the beginning of the 'new' Felix cartoons they made in the 1950s. Those ones with Poindexter and VaVoom are, for many reasons, detestable to me. I can literally remember my face spreading into a huge grin when the Felix theme song came on after I stuck the Felix tape in the VCR. Cartoon theme songs still hold some unnatural power over me. I hear the first beats of Rescue Rangers or DuckTales or Count Duckula and magically become a happy, giggling eight year old with no problems.

Obelix C'est Fini!

Amid the snow and the cold I have finished my Obelix piece! I must say, I think he turned out splendidly. I am unhappy with the shoes but couldn't really find a much better way to make it work (a random mistake in my stitching meant a few extra stitches/changes here and there) so I will forget my perfectionism for now.

Of course, this means it is high time to start on my Roman piece, aka, a bit of extreme masochism. I love ancient Rome though. I'll be looking for some other images of the ancient world or quotes too. My next high ambition is to find a good piece of Vercingetorix to do - there is some rule in the movies that only extremely handsome men get to play Vercingetorix and having the nice mustache makes them even more handsome, I think! My new goal is to marry someone who's competed in the World Beard and Mustache Championships, actually. Perhaps I could lobby them to start an Ancient Gaul category.

While working on Obelix I've been watching an absolutely hilarious Scottish show called Still Game. I grew up hearing tons of accents and dialects and generally have no problem with British shows (unlike a lot of Americans, sadly). This one is a bit harder because the first three seasons (series) especially have a ton of Glaswegian slang, but I've only had to look things up a couple times. I highly recommend the show though, funniest thing I've seen in ages. Plus, it's helping me work on my accent (I can do Irish accents and all sorts of English dialects - Yorkshire is my favorite, but for some reason Scottish is much harder, probably because you hear it less).

It's a great source for quotes too, though sadly I only wrote one down so now I'll need to go back and re-watch the show to gather some more. This will almost surely be my next needlework quote piece though: "There's nay disease called Moody Bastarditis."

Or possibly a quote from another British show I finally get to re-watch after seven years or so, A Very Peculiar Practice ("Altered priorities ahead"). It stars one of my favorite actors, a Scotsman, Graham Crowden, who died at 86 a few weeks back, despite managing to look about 90 years old for the past 30 years. He also starred in the amazingly fabulous Waiting For God.

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.

***

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.