Tulip pattern

I am a horrible person!

I totally forgot to post this free pattern here. I created it from an art nouveau design and you get it for frees.

Right now I'm working on my "Stay the hell out of my kitchen" pattern, but things have been busy, so it's rather slow going.

In order to save the pattern at full size, click on it and then right click and select "View image." The red square marks the center of the piece.

I did manage to have an excellent few hours with my photogenic niece and nephew recently. They were playing Bob the Builder. Evie is old enough now that they can really play together and gang up on their parents. It's nice and sweet, but also a bit worrisome. 

Time is a Drug - Finished!

Well, here it is in all its glory. I did finish it Tuesday night, but ended up going out for a lot of the day yesterday. With Etsy you always want to post patterns Monday-Friday from 9-5, because apparently everyone does their internetting at work now.

Anyway, the pattern is now for sale in my shop. I've altered the corner pieces a bit, to make them smoother and more pleasing, and adjusted the spacing of the text, so people making the pattern will have prettier pieces than me!

I'm really pleased with the colors on this one. I think it would look even better if you did a mix of the dark and light purple on the smaller flowers as well, though I like my way too.

Wisteria Progress Two

This piece looks less like a map of ocean depths now that the bee and all that green has been added. I had to change all the colors for the bee (otherwise it would have been bright red-brown and green!), and I'm curious to see how the flowers will look when it's finished. 

With most of it there are so many tiny bits of color, and SO many colors (50) that I just can't just whether those will be correct. With that yellow blob the shades seemed to be reversed from the colors under the pattern symbols and in the small picture of the pattern. It had the darker shade being stitched where it shows the lighter shade. That's the only color I changed, because those shades were so close that it wouldn't have been detectable when stitched.

I finally finished my Asterix pattern though, so I've gotten a good start on that. However, now I'll have to make another Obelix pattern so that his size will be in scale with Asterix's. 

Even with basically having all the time in the world it still feels like there's so little time. I suppose that's always the way though. When my sister and I managed a book store and had few weeks without overtime it felt the same way. Art and crafts are great, but to be honest I'd rather be rushing around in a bookstore, calling magazine distributors to yell at them, dealing with difficult customers, and trying to be tactful towards aspiring (and horrible) local authors. That, my friends, is heaven.

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.

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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.