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.

Almost done with Poor Little Willy!

Well, I wouldn't say it's been fun, but at least my blackwork piece is over 50% done. It might be 100% finished but I haven't decided yet. I'd like to do another border on the top and bottom, something with a little bit of color (green and blue are colors, granted, but they're dark and monocolored).

My usual confidence has deserted me though. This piece has been such a nightmare and I still haven't decided whether or not to fill those gaps at the end of two text lines. If I do fill them, what with? Something completely different? A motif from the green border? I have no idea. It seems like pressing forward is also pressing my luck.

In the end, I know that I will press on. I have a plan, I have a pattern and I want this present to be impressive. Depending on the person, handmade gifts can be viewed as a cop out, cheating at Christmas or something. The effort that goes into a pair of hand-knit gloves or mittens is often not understood by those who don't knit. However, it must be understood that my dad is the opposite. He would rather have something his children made than pretty much anything else on earth (possibly he would enjoy a case of fine single malt Scotch whiskey even more, but don't quote me). Baked goods, knit things, wood projects (my brother's arena), etc... He loves it. Watching his face when I tell him I baked him something is one of my favorite things on earth. It drives me to wear myself down to a lump of pain and exhaustion, no matter what, just to see him enjoy something I baked.

Stitching one of his favorite old rhymes with elaborate borders and framing it is something I know he'll adore. I know he'll love it as-is but I want it to be huge. For the past few years at Christmas I have focused on my parents. For the past five years my sister and I have done their stockings (since they did ours for so many years) and I've gotten my siblings just one or two things while trying to get four or five presents for my parents. This has been a problem since my income is extremely low but happily my parents love the hand-made.

99% sure that the final lower border will be the irises shown on the chart in some previous post. The same dark green for the stems and a lighter (but not super bright) blue for the flowers. Still sliightly unsure on the final top border. Happy to have it this far done though! I still love blackwork more than anything. The even, certitude of cross-stitch but with more flexibility, what's not to love?

Does working with Aida make you forget how to count?

Do you stare at the fabric, all the little squares, and immediately forget everything you meant to fix? Do you repeatedly count some segments? Does it cause you throw up your hands and give in to the mistakes? Do you slyly claim that the mistakes had to be made in deference to the Native American belief about such things?

Well, I do. It makes me crazy. I love needlework, absolutely love it. The problem is that there's too much to think of at once. With knitting you rarely have more than one thing to consider. Yeah there's counting rows sometimes and if you're doing Fair Isle there's more to think about but it's less work and there are typically large swatches of mindless knitting. I knit a lot of hats and I don't use a pattern so there's no counting and it's in the round so it's all knit stitch, no purl. I could do it in my sleep.

So here's a progress picture of my Victorian (or possibly earlier) rhyme about poor little Willy. I love how the border turned out but beyond that I am so frustrated. First the text was going to be too long (would screw up the border repeats) so I had to cut down the font to a less pretty version. Then the border spacing was still off so I had to cut the right side vertical border down by one square which my dad probably won't notice but would drive me to drink. Then after I had already pulled out the first few words I realized that although I'd fixed the border spacing I'd yet again forgotten to indent the text so it would be centered.

Well. Screw. That. I refused to go back and yank it again. It would not be centered and everyone would have to deal with it. I might do a small fiery design in the spaces after the first and third lines or a motif based on the border. Opinions? In any case, I would make it look great or I would go on a ruthless killing spree. Honestly, It's surprising that more serial killers aren't needleworkers.

Granted, my mind is foggy on the best of days. Between the pain and the way the disease eats my memory away I have a real problem focusing on details. Yet I have chosen to make cross-stitch and blackwork my new favorite hobbies. Obviously the RSD is eating away at my whole brain and not just my memory functions. Obviously I should return to plain freehand embroidery (as I have a niece on the way I'm sure I will at some point).

Why have I included a picture of adorable five year old me with my ten year old sister? Because I keep thinking about the new little niece my sister is growing and wondering how my nephew Benjamin will react to having a little sister. I hope (and believe) that he will love her like I love my sister. He's such a sweet, happy kid. A two year old who is able to understand that he needs to be extra gentle with me will be a good big brother, I think.

Okay, no, I just really wanted an excuse to show off how darned adorable I was! Beat THAT, new baby. Baby Meredith has the monopoly on cuteness. Forever!

Slowly but Happily

I started work on my Roman mosaic cross-stitch piece the other day and am moving along slowly, but happily.

Why not slowly but surely? Because surety is not as important as keeping cross-stitching a happy hobby for me. I am disabled and unable to work, therefore I have a lot of hours I can embroidery each day. However, doing hours and hours each day eventually starts to feel like work (hence one reason why I've been taking a break from knitting).

With such a big, complex piece of needlework the chance of getting burnt out and sick of the project is even higher. I'm trying to keep a smaller project around to work on at the same time when I need a less taxing bit of work and am also trying to make some new patterns (Tintin and Captain Haddock are in the works). I have a Felix the Cat pattern I made but that might be a little too boring since he's all-black.

The last couple days I haven't done any work on the mosaic as my sister and nephew have been visiting. Yesterday my nephew said my name for the first time! He's connected my name to me for six months or more but this past month he's started vocalizing first granny, grandpa, and now me! He's such a sweetheart (25 months old now) and is really the light of my life. My sister is also currently pregnant with their second, due in early May, and we just found out it will be a girl! So then I'll have two lights of my life (and they're moving down here soon so I'll get to see them all the time)!

I'm also working up a blackwork pattern focused around this rather old rhyme which my dad loves:

Little Willy in the best of sashes
Fell in the fire and was burnt to ashes
By and by the room grew chilly
For no one liked to poke up Willy

Buckling down for the good of all...

Well my last post must have been a bit cathartic because I buckled down and finished the cursed piece. It's not like there was much left to do, but it was all annoying because there were various corners that needed five or six stitches only. If they'd needed twenty stitches I wouldn't mind but a mere five or six is just...frustrating.

I even worked on it while hanging out with my sweet and maddeningly adorable nephew Benjamin. He's two years old and very into letters and numbers. He knows the whole alphabet and numbers up to twelve (and a few random teen number and maybe twenty, I forget) and whenever he sees words or numbers he likes to point them out. It makes it dangerous to do cross-stitch around him, given that toddlers are well-known to often have sticky, messy fingers, but I risked it. The phrase "This is a no-touch item," was oft repeated.

Of course, I may have rushed into this a little too heedlessly. Now all I have on the books is the big, complex Roman mosaic - a piece which alternately frightens and enlivens me. I am excited to do it, but I'm so scared of messing it up to the point where it must be scrapped.

The other day I made a Felix the Cat cross-stitch pattern and I'd like to do a Tintin piece for my nephew. My sister has a mug with Captain Haddock on it and a little picture of Tintin on the bottom, this has led young Benjamin to point to the bottom of all dishware, and pretty much anything he can pick up, and say "Tintin!" He has a dutch Tintin counting book which he absolutely adores.

As this is the formerly-cursed piece, I do absolutely love how it turned out. While the border was fussy and frustrating I think it looks wonderful and the greens are close enough in shade to not distract from the text yet distinct enough to make the mosaic pattern shine. Again, I adore my little snakes and mice, especially the mice, and I believe I'll try to work the basic design into a blackwork sampler featuring various animals.

Cross-stitch Quotations

There are many things that make cross-stitch appealing to me. It indulges my OCD, my desire for symmetry, and my love of amusing quotes. It keeps my hands busy, if aching, and the concentration I put towards it mirrors meditation. Other than the extra aching, these are the things that I need most in life, such utter distraction that I can forget the world and my circumstances.

Yet for all the distraction my constant inner feeling appears in the quotes that I choose. None are so accurate as this quote from a Calvin and Hobbes comic strip, to which I've added a little judicious swearing.

It's true, isn't it? Reality can ruin all our lives to various extents in various ways. We build up our defenses, our distractions, and we lose ourselves in them until some bit of the bad old world intrudes into that bubble. So we shrug and we sigh and above all we say "fuck this."

The border is my own design, and you are free to use it, if you'd like. Click on any of the pictures for the full-size image.

Happy crafting!