Finished coaster

Well my lovelies, here is the finished Steal Your Face coaster which I'm rather dissatisfied with. The reason being that I left out some back stitch lines on either side of the skull that I meant to do.

My brain just can't hold anything anymore.

I have had a bit of wine so I'm not going to keep typing. Never know what might slip out!

Steal Your Face

Well here's the basic pattern for my Grateful Dead coaster. Again, it's from the Steal Your Face album. I think it turned out pretty well for the size. It should really have been a larger pattern in order to keep more of the detail, but this is for a coaster with a fixed size and even then I had to stitch it on 18 ct. Aida. I'll be doing the red and blue sections in half stitches so the black stays prominent.

I may design a larger more accurate version and who knows, maybe I'll do a series of band logos. When I was 15 or so I would do my own punk covers of Grateful Dead or Bob Dylan songs to annoy my mother. If only I'd known any Pink Floyd songs that would have annoyed her the most! Though I think in generally she's a bit scoffing toward most covers or any song she actually likes.

I've also gotten a bit more done on my Tintin piece and may possibly have found a decent orange to use for his hair. So now the trick is whether that orange makes the skin tone acceptable. The skin tone color is close enough to what's in the books but you know how it is, can't tell how it will work with the orange until the stitches are next to each other. It might at least work in half stitches, but I've used so many of those in this piece already that I'd rather have full stitches.

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.

Tom Lehrer, part two

Well, she's all done. Live pigeons, dead pigeons, bottle of poisons, and a few skulls for good measure. Classic. 

It is obviously only the first of my Tom Lehrer lyric pieces. Next will probably need to be a line from The Old Dope Peddler. Also of course I need to decide whether to sell the pigeon piece or keep it for myself. I don't really have room to hang up more art at the moment, but eventually I might...

Now I'm waffling over whether or not to start another piece with a quote from Kim Possible. I can't tell whether it would be at all amusing to anyone else though, and while I know a few adult KP fans (it is seriously a hilarious show) I don't know that there are a lot of them. The quote is "Your fancy pants will become your very undoing," (it's best if you say it in a German accent). So, opinions? Workable? 

Otherwise I'll start work on Scrooge McDuck/Don Rosa quote piece that will be a Christmas present for my dad. I finished another Christmas present but I haven't blogged about it since it's such an obscure reference. I did design a nice blackwork ax for it though, which I'm a bit proud of.

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.

pretend quilting

I finally present to you the completely finished (and framed) color-fade blackwork piece. It's not exactly what I wanted, because I didn't start with a large enough piece of fabric but it does look pretty. 

Plus it gave me a lot of ideas for color fade pieces which I could then do properly. Before that I need to bulk up my thread collection. I have a ton of embroidery floss, but not enough oranges and not enough blues and missing some important reds. It feels like I never have the colors I want.

I got a new computer, as mine was getting run down (especially in the touchpad department) and I'd like to have a backup that still works normally. The new machine is running Linux because holy crap I hate Windows 7. I thought I just disliked it, but having to use it for more than two minutes at a time amped the dislike right up to despise. 

We used Linux on all the computers at my high school (a tiny boarding school) so I'm not completely unfamiliar with it (though even if I was Ubuntu is SO intuitive that it should be easy for anyone to use). The best part for me is downloading all the free applications. I got a geography lesson program and can now identify all the countries on all the continents and a number of island nations. When something big happens in Moldova or Togo I'll know just where they are! I'm beyond psyched about this.

So thank you, Microsoft, for completely screwing up the operating system I grew up with and liked using. You even managed to make networking my two computers a pain and not workable. Now that's talent. Change for change's sake is always a bad idea.

moths and daleks

Well there's news all around. I finished my moth piece. Again, it comes from Leslie Wilkins' Traditional Blackwork Samplers, though I've removed a lot of the little elements which I felt took away from the lovely moth. I'm fairly pleased with it. Not thoroughly pleased but I'll give it to someone so I don't have to look at it any more.

Also, someone will be stitching my Dalek pattern on stage in a play they're in! It's the play The Great Fire, being performed in Chicago at the Lookingglass Theater (which just won an award for Best Regional Theater). So hundreds of people will be witnessing my pattern being stitched whether they know it or not. Too bad you can't send business cards with a .jpg file! It's a nice warm feeling though.

I have been so lazy with the crafts though. I resolve to start work on a new funny pattern tomorrow though. Perhaps a Tom Lehrer quote.