Time is a Drug - WIP 01

Here's the first look at my new project. 

The full quote is "Time is a drug-- too much of it kills you." The line comes from the Terry Pratchett book Small Gods, which is one of my very favorite Discworld books.

This piece will eventually have a super huge ornate border.

I woke up quite early today after staying up too late, because I was excited that my mum's home from Belgium. Of course this meant I accidentally took quite a long nap in the afternoon which means who knows when I'll fall asleep tonight, and it's all a VICIOUS CYCLE wherein I get very little done.

Pray Speak Quietly...

This is a line said by Vincent Price in the movie The Fall of the House of Usher. I thought it was neat, and useful for all those times when you need to remind people to shut up.

I've actually designed two borders for this. The one you see, appropriate for Don't Wake the Baby needs, and one with rows of bats (the same as in the first design) on top and bottom and a scroll/tassel motif on the sides. I'll be stitching a section of the bats border later, but wanted to go ahead and post the pattern.

Both patterns are now available in my Etsy store!

Watch Out, They Taste Curvy

One of my favorite things in comedy shows is when they put amusing posters in doctors' offices. They were especially skilled at this in the old show A Very Peculiar Practice (which I highly recommend, if you can find it).

There are also a few good posters in one episode of the Scottish show Still Game, which is about my favorite comedy ever, and that's where this piece comes from. It's completely insane and amazing, plus I love the Glaswegian slang.

Anyway, the point of this post is that this pattern is now for sale in my Etsy shop. Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair!

I am trying to keep up both a Facebook page and a Tumblr for my shop, so there are those links. Also, I'm looking for pictures of my patterns that other people have stitched, so if you fulfill that criteria please do send me a snap.

If I can wrangle up some more press then I'll be doing some contests and such soon.

Time Spent Dismounted...

Remember this guy? 

The quote is by A.D. Wintle, famous London eccentric. I'm sure I'm taking the quote out of context, but that's life.I also redesigned the traditional Blackwork man to be a bit more suggestive.

So the point of all that is that the pattern is now for sale in my Etsy shop. Yay me!

I could be done with The Cheat by now, but ended up sleeping for twelve hours straight (it's been a really exhausting week), thus not waking up until 11:45! Sigh. Oh well. Technically I could have gotten more done last night, but I wanted to be sure the color was going to work out so I only stitched a few rows in the last color as it was dark.

If you give a man a fire...

My break from Pogo was well-used, and helped me work a little more steadily on the monotony of black stitches. Pogo is actually almost done now, I just forgot to post about the quote piece yesterday.

This pattern is now for sale in my Etsy shop!

Choosing to stitch this on Monaco (an all-cotton even-wave) was a great choice. Blackwork is always harder to photograph though, so I must assure everyone that it looks SO much better in person. I'm really pleased with the combination of italic text and the wind-blown look of the flames.

When I designed the pattern I tried filling in the spaces between the second and the third flame colors but nothing really looked right. I have a new idea of how to do it so I might work on that a bit if I ever find the time.

This quote is from the Terry Pratchett book Jingo. It seems it's no longer in print in the US which is a crime! In my benevolent dictatorship I will be the one controlling what goes in and out of print.

Unlikely Small Ads - Maybe finished?

I've completed all of the text for my Mock the Week piece of Unlikely Small Ads. When I originally drafted the pattern I set the whole thing without a thick black outline, two stitches wide/high. Now I'm not sure whether to complete it with that border, or just put another line of black stitch along the bottom and have done with it.

Probably I'll leave it here, actually, because now it's just a tiny bit less than 10 inches wide. I'm thinking a dark grey/black mat and black frame, to really make it pop. 

The whole picture did turn out nicely though, and I think I balanced the fonts and the colors well, so that the words don't run together. The cursive is a bit hard to read at that angle, but it says "Lady seeks males for walks, laughs, and eye-watering anal sex." Again, here's the clip that this piece comes from.

Now I've been working on that damn wisteria piece, but I think it's time to go back to the old chintz napkin for a bit.

Unlikely Small Ads

So here's the first look at my Mock the Week cross-stitch project. I'm about halfway done with it now. It's a bit ruder than I usually stitch (though those parts aren't done yet), but it cracks me up.

This is a clip of that scene, though they spend almost the first minute of that video pissing around. I haven't used all the lines, but I did use quite a lot (there are 13 total). The "FOUND" one isn't in that clip but is in a BBC clip.

It's enjoyable stitching, much more so than that damned wisteria piece. Random swatches of color, few efficient ways to stitch, endless opportunities for mistakes you won't notice until hours later... I'm still missing a few colors for it, but hoping to get them today or tomorrow.

Celtic G - finished!

Well the G is all done and now it's ironed and framed as well! I'm fairly pleased with it. I would have done the date differently, but needed to do it the same way it appears on my nephew's. Though really, I'm pretty sure they'll never be confused about when they were born, so it doesn't matter.

Since that finished I've been working on the pattern for my Mock the Week - Unlikely Small Ads piece. It. Is. Frustrating. I have a newly discovered sympathy for the newspaper layout people. Though to be fair, they're not dealing with trying to find numerous yet diverse backstitch fonts and whether enough room can be made to squeeze in some cross-stitch fonts. 

It is *almost* done though. I'm just waiting to hear back from an English friend about the way something would be written there.

When I got too frustrated with it/couldn't sit with the computer anymore, I started working on a photo cross-stitch piece, as My Photo Stitch is my new favorite website. I've converted a number of flower photos I've taken, and actually started working on this wisteria and bee one. Let me just say, I hate this kind of stitching and pattern, as it's so...random. I do love the site though, and I'm trying to find good pictures of my niece and nephew to use.

Humor for sale!

This is my second project using a quote from Terry Pratchett's Discworld books, and the pattern is now for sale in my Etsy shop. This line is one I find particularly true and funny, and it comes from the book The Last Continent.

I was about to say "one of my favorite Discworld books" but I love them all SO much that I can't even really choose a favorite from the various recurring character books. Anyway, I created that border pattern myself and it's not as annoying to stitch as it may look. You just have to do things in an efficient order.

Now I'm working on a pattern of a round of the TV show Mock the Week. The prompt was "Unlikely Classified Ads" and so I'm doing a newspaper sheet layout of my favorites. It is one of the most frustrating things I've EVER worked on though. Laying out newspaper pages in a pleasing and symmetrical manner is a bitch!

My OCD tendencies decided that I must own every single color of DMC thread, so yesterday I spent FOUR HOURS winding newly-purchased thread onto bobbins and organizing my thread. At first I started putting them in numerical order, but since I don't stitch many patterns made by other people I realized that would just make picking colors for my own patterns more difficult.

I can literally spend hours arranging the thread by color, trying to get it perfectly ordered within each shade and hue. This is an impossible task, but I fiddle with it every time I start a new project. I'm buying the thread a bit at a time (the cost does add up quite rapidly!), so this drama will stretch on for a while.

no more funny

Well I finished the A.D. Wintle piece. I think it turned out really well. That might be something I keep for myself. I really don't get attached to keeping my finished pieces, even the ones I absolutely love. I just have a need to obsessively stitch in order to distract myself, so I do.

I'm going to do the family rules pattern in shades of blue, with the non-red parts of the flowers in the darkest navy. I think that will be nice but I'm feeling a bit hesitant about it. Given that it's a family/happy thing I don't want to do it in just black and red.

Opinions?

back to the humour

Well I'm back to stitching something funny that's not an in-joke! That's where I like to be.

After this I'll start my family rules pattern. I also got the material for my Understood Betsy book cover. 

I've been running around too much for various reasons (not so much for myself) and have been SO tired. I made a nice hash for breakfast though, as I really wanted something *real* to eat. It had sweet onions, garlic, grated sweet potato, cubed white potatoes, and Chesapeake Bay seasoning. I made it in the oven, so it didn't really tire me, and I swear it's the only thing that kept me from crying.

Life is skittles and life is beer...

I love Tom Lehrer's music. Absolutely love it. My dad found it when he was in college and introduced me to it when I was in middle school. My first exposure was the song Poisoning Pigeons in the Park, which my dad chose to teach me (we drove a lot, so we sang in the car all the time) because I don't like birds. I spent a good portion of my senior year singing "Bright College Days" at people.

Yes, that was me in the park as a 10 year old running and screaming at the pigeons to make them fly away. You can't just run at them, they don't go far enough. I perfected a sort of squawky crow noise that worked wonders. I still do it as an adult, even from a wheelchair. 

So here's a WIP shot of the Tom Lehrer embroidery I'm working on. The border below the text will be a line of dead pigeons. Then I'll be doing rows of poison bottles and a skull on either side. Overkill? Perhaps, but that's the point of the song!

My favorite line in the song is actually "We'll murder them all amid laughter and merriment, except for the few we take home to experiment," but it doesn't make a good stand-alone embroidery piece. The line I chose is recognizable to fans but not the most predictable choice. Plus people who don't know the song might also find it funny. 

The only downside is that while working on it I literally can not get the song out of my head. Even while listening to other music my head is still singing about poisoning pigeons.

on the subject of cheese

Hung out with my nephew for three hours. Extremely tired.

This is a GK Chesterton quote, which I love. I also love cheese, obviously.

My dad is coming down this weekend which I'm super excited about. 

Now I must pass out.

Watch out!

One of my favorite things in TV shows is background jokes. In A Very Peculiar Practice the doctors offices are full of strange posters, one of which is, I think "How can another woman get you pregnant?" I notice these things and I love and adore them.

Still Game is one of my favorite shows ever. I about died when I first saw it. It's hilarious and it's geared to appeal to people in their thirties and older. It seems like in the US everything is geared toward teenagers and twenty-somethings.

Anyway, in one episode of Still Game (series 2 episode 3) there's a poster in the background that shows a picture of a banana with the words shown on my cross stitch piece. Hilarious! I crack up just thinking of it. I think my banana looks lovely. I used Andy Warhol's banana as a guide. Maybe I can sell it to a local restaurant or green grocer!

If anyone is interested in the banana pattern (or the entire pattern, really), just let me know and I'll send it to you or post it here if there's enough interest.

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.

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.

Rice Pudding and the Art of Comfort

I finished this newest blackwork piece amid swirls of snow that accumulated far more than I'd been expecting. I think it must have suddenly gotten much colder outside, as it had been snowing on and off most of the day with no real accumulation even on cars. When I looked out in the evening all of a sudden there was two or three inches on the road.

I really like how this piece came out. I managed to remember to center the text before finishing to the whole piece and decided to just do the borders all the same length regardless of whether or not they would end on a partial repeat. This was the best idea, I think. It makes it much more pleasing to me, certainly. Granted, I wish that with the larger repeat of the last border that I'd counted and just indented by one, which wouldn't be enough to make it look odd. I think my graduating purples looks good as well (you can't tell, but the top border is lavender). All glory to the rice pudding! And all glory to Doctor Who for always providing good quotes.

On snowy, bad feeling days all I want is rice pudding. Or bread pudding. Or my mother's chicken curry. Let's stick to rice pudding though, since that's what led me to write down and then stitch this particular quote. The line is extremely close to my general personality. If I were ruling a country or the world the thing I would revel most in would not be the power (that comes second) but the ability to have all the good food I want. I could go on about the various types of difficult to make (pastries) and difficult to find (unpasteurized milk) food I would have, but I think this anecdote will make things clear. When I first began working full time after high school I spent almost all of my money (after rent, which was very minimal) on food. Being able to buy the pricey natural chips I love best or expensive ice cream or tubs of brie was just amazing.

Today though, as I am waiting for the snow to melt and my lemon tree to bloom, I think I will make rice pudding (Indian style, cold and milky with almonds and golden raisins), watch some funny British people, and just curl up for a bit.

Pastel, floral bastards...

I have finished my Still Game quote cross-stitch and it may be my most favorite piece so far! I love the colors, I love the borders, I love the font, and obviously I love the quote.

The only thing I'm not pleased with is the purple border above the quote. Initially it was just the lighter purple with the design left open. However, all the other borders use two colors and it started looking weird to me to have an odd one out. So I filled it in and it looks fine and all, I just think it looked better plain.

The first border below the quote turned out much lovelier than I first anticipated. I think it looks very old fashioned, like something my great-aunts would have done in the early 1940s. It is, however, one of those pain in the ass patterns. You can stitch it across without having to break and restart the thread at all, but you have to stitch in a very particular order and not lose concentration. Looks lovely though, doesn't it?

Bastardization of Tradition...

This is what I like most about cross-stitch - the combination of traditional borders/motifs and modern/snarky quotes. It's just so much fun. Plus, quotation pieces can be finished relatively quickly. From the moment I heard this line on the Scottish comedy Still Game I knew I wanted to stitch it.

I'm really pleased with the color combinations in this piece. There will be three different borders under the quote as well and I'm generally planning to use the same colors as in the top borders. The font is basically this half-uncial one with some alterations since I wanted more typical lowercase letters, I love how it turned out though.

I'm always amazed at how different something can look once it's stitched. The purple border ended up looking very argyle-ish, which I adore. I did learn something very vulnerable with this project though. Mainly that it is very difficult to stitch when your nose is leaking like a sieve. I have a bad cold/flu/thing that began with that super watery type of nose running where it just leaks out no matter what. I'm surprised I didn't get any on the project because I was still trying to stitch as much as possible. Now it's all about that typing of wracking cough that shakes your whole throat and some very questionably colored phlegm. Thank god for needlework, in any case.