yet again...

This is a hard time of year for me. First it's my nephew's birthday, then my sister's, then my brother-in-law's, then Thanksgiving. After that it's clear sailing though, since I've had all my Christmas shopping done for ages.

I've been being really productive and doing actually useful things, so of course the embroidery suffers. Really it's a good thing though as I needed to clean out my fridge and get a new dresser and all that.

What I'm super excited about is having bought the best tea cup ever! It's the Royal Winton Queen Anne chintz design which is a cross-stitch pattern basically. How cool is that? I can't wait to the do the matching tea napkin.

There are new patterns in my Etsy store and I'm hoping to start an Uncle Scrooge quote for my dad for Christmas. My brain is so sick of working on patterns on the computer though. 

Instead I'm burying myself in True Stories of the Great War a collection of stories/articles edited by Francis Trevelyan Miller. When you read the titles you have to say them around in a very dramatic newsreel voice. Titles such as "Tales of the Daring Rides of a French Trooper" and "What the Kaiser's Son Saw on the Battlefield." I am utterly mad for that kind of thing. It's usually interesting but also makes me giggle.

recovery

I am slowly recovering from the North Carolina mini-vacation. I'm not hurting as much now but I'm just completely exhausted to the point where small tasks make me shake a bit.

We did squeeze a lot into a short vacation though. The Scrap Exchange was freaking AMAZING and I highly recommend a trip. I didn't buy much in the line of craft supplies because I have so many already, but I found two record sets (a Big Band compilation and an opera) and everything was fifty cents!

I bought too many books, got that one last Christmas present which was eluding me, and got a more serviceable sugar bowl and creamer for every days. We went to the Replacements showroom which was freaking INSANE. Huge and full of gorgeousness, such expensive gorgeousness. We also went to some nice gardens and did our Ikea-ing.

Here is the finished Ambrose Bierce quote. My embroidery energy got a little blah because of skipping some stitches in the Celtic G which mean I have to start over. Glugh.

happy Armistice Day!

Today is Armistice Day. My grandfather Guthrie was overseas during WWI because he was quite ancient, having been born in 1900 and being 48 when my own father was born. He joined the navy, loved the hammocks, got a lot of tattoos, and dated many girls in Scotland (slightly bribing their parents with goods from the ship's store). I couldn't find the paper poppy I made last year so this time I knit one! Turned out very nicely.

Also I thought I had a picture of my latest finished project but it turns out I don't! Gasp! It is a piece with the Ambrose Bierce quote "Debt, n. An ingenious substitute for the chain and whip of the slave- driver." It turned out beautifully and I can't wait to show it to you!

I'm taking a mini-vacation with la madre or I'd take a picture right now. With me on this trip I have the materials to start another Celtic letter project from Mike Vickery's book Celtic Cross-Stitch. This time I'll be doing a G for my niece Geneva.

Here is an excerpt from my favorite WWI poet, Wilfred Owen, and his poem Insensibility. You can read the full poem here.

     Happy are men who yet before they are killed
     Can let their veins run cold.
     Whom no compassion fleers
     Or makes their feet
     Sore on the alleys cobbled with their brothers.
     The front line withers,
     But they are troops who fade, not flowers
     For poets' tearful fooling:
     Men, gaps for filling
     Losses who might have fought
     Longer; but no one bothers.

Whoops!

I thought I had posted an entry about this project but apparently not! My brain is draining.

Today was my nephew's third birthday! I got him some books, because I just don't like buying toys for children (who all have too many toys already). My mom got him a cheap ukulele though, which he was adorably strumming.

Anyway. Not sure whether I'll add another lighter yellow past the orange-yellow (which is completed now). I do like the general look.

Finished!

Well here is Tintin, all finished. I think it turned out absolutely beautifully.

It's a bit hard to decide what to do with it, since my siblings and I all grew up with Tintin comics and my nephew Benjamin loves Tintin as well. Benjamin isn't really in a position to appreciate art though. I will probably end up selling this, just because I've already embroidered Christmas presents for most of my family.

I'm really a bit proud of the pattern though. The only thing I don't like is the left side of the spotlight. It looks a little odd/flat because of Tintin being in the way. I'm sure it's fine and Madre would scoff at me for thinking about it but that's just the way I am.

Now it's time to come up with the next project. I think I need something snarky and adult to keep up my subversive credibility.

Massive Tintin progress

So here's quite a lot of progress on Tintin. The spotlight improved the piece amazingly and the black is looking great. The full cross stitches around the leg (and around Snowy) still show up very well even in the sea of black half-stitches, which had been my main worry.

The only thing I don't like is that now the shadow stitches look a lot lighter, but that's a pretty small complaint. There's a lot of black to fill in but it's going more quickly than I expected (though that's true of pretty much every project).

more Tintin

Here's a lot of progress on the Tintin. I've now started the yellow spotlight bit in full stitches and it looks SO great next to the half-stitches of the shadow.

My pondering now is whether I can do some darker half-stitches around the all the whole thing, as it looks odd to have a spotlight on light fabric. I would do them face the opposite direction from the shadow stitches and probably not in black (though maybe) but in something darker than the shadow at least.

Glugh! It's all getting a bit complicated! The endless yellow stitches did take me through the end of Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell, which was a 26 hour long audio book. Poor woman died with one chapter left to write. Instead of having something complete the book they had some friend of hers write an epilogue talking about what Mrs. Gaskell had told everyone the last chapter would contain, which I think was rather sweet. It was a wonderful book, though at times the pacing of mid-19th century books gets me down. It never really hots up or does anything quickly. You always know how things will turn out in these older books but how they get there and the writing is so lovely.