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.
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.
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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.
