So I found this cross stitch at the thrift store the other day, and decided that it was clearly asking for some kind of enhancement. I spent quite a bit of time pondering what to do with it - giant monster stepping over the trees? Zombies on the lawn? But then, suddenly inspiration struck from the user pic of one of my Facebook friends:
And I came up with this:
I like to imagine this is the kind of thing Goodwife Scully would have stitched as a Yuletide gift for Fox Mulder, her partner at the Colonial Agency for the Occult and Paranormale.
Well, hello there! Sorry about the silence - I didn't really plan on taking a break from the blog, but it just sort of happened. February has felt like a quiet month to me - I've just had my head down, going through the days, doing lots of things but not really feeling the need to talk all about them. But now I'm back, so here's what I've been enjoying lately!
Eating:
I didn't remember to take a picture, but on Friday I cooked roasted tofu and vegetables, mostly following this recipe from Vegan Dad. We're not vegan, but this is a blog I enjoy quite a bit - I either will get ideas from his recipes or will make them but just de-veganize them if I don't have the vegan options on hand. I've made several of his recipes, always with success, and this was no different. I chose to marinate my tofu in veggie broth and some seasonings, but otherwise I followed this pretty much straight through. It was pretty tasty! I think I would have preferred it with seitan for a bit more texture, but otherwise it was quite delicious. I love pot roasts, so it's nice to find a suitable vegetarian replacement.
Reading:
I am sort of simul-reading White Noise by Don DeLillo and Bossypants by Tina Fey - essentially, I turn to the Tina Fey book whenever White Noise starts getting kind of heavy, which is frequent. This is a book that one of my co-workers lent me in a book swap that we're doing, and I know I tried reading it years ago but couldn't really get into it, so I'm trying again. Bossypants is quite cute though.
Listening:
My new favorite song has got to be this: "You, Me & the Boatman" by Quiet Company from Austin, Texas. The handsome gent singing is the husband of Leah Muse of Vacant.cc, a blog I've been reading for literally years and years and years. This is one hell of a catchy tune, and I have enjoyed dancing to it in my kitchen quite a bit. You can get a digital download of their album, We Are All Where We Belong, for only $8 - and it is super worth it.
Crafting:
I haven't been doing much embroidery lately - I've been really trying to make dresses for the Dress A Girl Around The World program. Here are four I made on Saturday in the very uncooperative wind. I love the little fake patchwork fabric - I got that from the thrift store a while back in a random fabric bag.
I've also been working on a big chevron quilt for our bed. I've never done a quilt with triangles before, and I'm already discovering my lack of precision sewing skills are making them match up a little wonky, but I think I've just decided to accept that.
Crafting/Watching:
When I do feel like embroidering again, I sketched up this little design, inspired by Eric watching Twin Peaks for the first time last week. Or, at least he watched it until he found out who killed Laura Palmer, causing him to declare the show stupid and stop watching.
I've got good news! That gum you like is going to come back in style.
So, as a little Valentine's gift, I have pictures of my two newest finished pieces:
Do I look like Mother Theresa?" I was recently watching Heathers, and man, there are just so many good quotes in it. Like this one:
(which also creates an incredibly smooth segue into my next piece...)
Everyone's favorite chaos theorist, Dr. Ian Malcolm! And his best pal, a terrible velociraptor!
I decided to try out a new technique for the shading of Malcolm - originally I was just going to leave it blank, but I felt like the black clothes/hair/sunglasses are such an iconic part of the character that it just didn't work. I used a single thread to just make long straight lines, a little bit like cross-hatching, or I guess since it doesn't cross, just hatching? Either way, this was really fun to make, and then I spilled coffee on it, because I am good at things.
I hope you all enjoy your Valentine's Day and are not eaten by velociraptors!
So, in honor of National Embroidery Month, I thought I'd show off a couple past cross stitch projects today!
First up is a Star Wars project...
(Hey, nice dusty frame!) So, I stitched this up as a gift for Eric a while back, but the creative genius behind this pattern is Sherezada Windham-Kent of Hand/Eye/Mind/Mouth. I tweaked a couple things - the colors of the lightsabers, mostly. It was really fun to stitch up, and always gets a lot of smiles when people see it. It also always leads to the awkward conversation I have when people ask about it - I generally try to give credit when I'm wearing handmade things made by other people or if I follow a pattern for something versus making something from scratch. So people will look and say, "Wow! Did you make that??" And I say, "Yes, but it's actually a pattern made by this girl on the internet and blah blah blah..." and spend five minutes answering a question when they probably expected a simple yes/no.
Next, a lovely sentiment from Jay-Z. This might be one of my earliest cross stitch projects, I think. This is also often a visitor favorite in the house. Sadly, it fell off the wall recently and the frame cracked. Everything I own is broken or dirty: Welcome to my blog.
So here's a couple of hoops I finished on my long weekend...
This Chewbacca hoop can be seen in drawing form on January 8.
I tried to branch out of my normal backstitch-only, experimenting with different amounts of thread as well as split stitches and french knots (which I still hate).
This one is based on an image I saw on Tumblr, but sadly can no longer find the original image to credit the creator. If anyone happens to know where this is from, please let me know so I can give credit where it's due.
All those little letters were hard to stitch! Despite how often my embroideries include words, I kind of hate stitching letters. I'm constantly torn between my stitching preferences and my love of captioning all things.
Currently on the hoops, I have a Heathers quote cross-stitch going (I just watched it again on Saturday... so many good lines in that movie) and then after that I think I may work on this Jurassic Park piece I sketched up the other day. I think I need to emphasize Goldblum's nose a little bit more, but otherwise I'm pretty pleased with the concept. Also, I'm actually drawing in a sketchbook, as opposed to previous habits of hoarding sketchbooks but drawing on scraps of paper that I then use. It's a big day for me.
For the last couple of years, I have I really really tried to give mostly handmade Christmas presents. I generally don't manage to finish as many as I originally aim for, but this year I got a lot finished, and ones I'm pretty darn proud of, too. For instance, I made this tea towel for my mother-in-law:
A while back she had asked me to make a vintage inspired tea towel that said "But Hut Bed & Breakfast" for a decorating project (she calls their house the But Hut). So I took a vintage tea towel I had and came up with a little logo:
It features my in-laws' dog, Murphy. I started with the Ryan Berkley embroidery patterns from Sublime Stitching, and made some changes to the fox man to make it more Murphylike, and then made the frame and the lettering myself. I thought it came out pretty cute, and actually resembles the real Murphy:
I also crocheted a little border with some thin yarn:
And we received some handmade gifts! Eric's brother Evan made a painting of our cat Chewbacca for us:
I was definitely quite tickled to have such an awesome homage to our first pet! You can almost hear the mighty wookie roar.
Reading: I decided to switch gears from China Mieville's Perdido Street Station (which, while having a lot of interesting aspects, has failed to keep my attention very well), so I started in on the second book in the A Song of Fire and Ice series. I imagine I'll probably switch back and forth between the two books as needed. I'm really not this bad at reading books (I have a infrequently used B.A. in English from an average Ohio university to back that up, thankyouverymuch), but lately I've been taking on some books that are outside of my normal genres of interest, and sometimes it's been a little bit of a struggle.
Eating: Last night I made a banana oatmeal walnut bread using a recipe from the internets that sadly I can no longer find. It turned out pretty tasty, although I wish I had used maybe one more banana (I like my banana bread to be extra banana-y).
Crafting / Watching: As I've mentioned, a large percentage of any type of free time that I have lately is going towards making things for Handmade Arcade. So here's a cute little deer that I just recently finished, along with The Wonder Years. Thanks, Netflix.
Doing: This past Saturday, the Steel City Derby Demons had their season-closer bout and I was asked to announce. I've announced at scrimmages in the past, but never in front of a ton of people, so it was a bit nerve-wracking. I rustled up an appropriate Moxie Crimefighter costume (a lot of it is my Batgirl costume from last Halloween) and did the best I could. If there were awards for this sort of thing, I would probably win "Most Awkward Announcer Ever" but apparently I pull off awkward well (or probably people are just nice), because I got some kind words from people after the bout. It was a super awesome time too, with double wins for the SCDD.
Hello hello! Sorry it has been all crickets n'at around here, lately if I am not at work I have been crafting my butt off. I have been spending a lot of my free time just trying to make stuff to sell at Handmade Arcade. Like this little diptych I made:
I found some images from a book about making shadow puppets, and I thought they would look great as an art piece.
The hand features a rarely-seen second stitch: satin stitch (pretty much everything I do is in backstitch). The shadow is an applique that I stitched around the outside. Also, how hard is that hand position? I tried to show it to my girls at work today and they were all, "What is that?" And then one of them made her shadow puppet monster mouth eat the poor bunny.
PS: Totally unrealted to my own crafting, but check out this amazing quilt I found at the thrift store the other day:
I love the bright pink on the white, it's so punchy and high contrast. Also, it features some really lovely hand quilting (click that picture and check it out really really big - it's a very neat design). It always bums me out a little bit to see something so awesome that was obviously handmade by someone with a great deal of love and care at the thrift store. Sadly, it was $100, so it was out of my budget.
I've been recently acquiring a lot of hangable hoops from thrift stores and thought I'd try something just as a decoration rather than on clothes. I'm pretty pleased with it, but I think next time I'll try a colored fabric rather than the white. This great auk doesn't seem to mind too much if he's a bit awkward, though, so it's okay.
Holy moly, I have been busy busy busy at work lately, and my parents came to town for an evening, so I haven't even had a spare moment for a bloggin'. Sorry! Anyway, here's some of my newest embroidered pieces that I've worked on lately. It's been raining the last few days, so the lighting has been lousy, but whaddya gonna do? (Eric also kept making me laugh during these pictures, so I have some goofy faces going on)
First up is a sleepy little otter on a blue v-neck tee. I have been experimenting a little more with a cartoonish style recently, as seen here and in a couple of the onesies I've made lately. When I stitch on clothes, I always use gently-used clothes from the thrift store, because 1) it helps encourage variety in everything I make, because often times the color or cut will inspire what I embroider, and 2) it seems silly to me to get new things to sew on when there's already so much stuff out there just waiting to be used.
The little singing giraffe cameo makes a reappearance, this time for adults on this fuzzy pink cardigan. For some reason, our roommate's cat is obsessed with this sweater - she has stolen it twice from the middle of piles of things and run off with it. Maybe she just has good taste?
I just applied for Handmade Arcade for the second year in a row. I didn't get in last year, sadly, but we'll see how it goes this year. Fingers crossed!
Anyway, that wasn't the point of this post. In searching my other Flickr account (which I can't seem to actually log into anymore...), I found some pictures of a neat little project I made a few months back that I thought I would put back in the spotlight for a moment! I participated in my first Craftster swap - the theme was embroidery diptychs - and my partner listed among her interests Star Wars and Dia de los Muertos. My mind immediately went to the art of Jose Pulido. So I stitched up these beloved droids...
Probably one of the trickiest parts of the whole project was finding an oval hoop - I looked everywhere and couldn't find a vertical one, so I eventually had to settle for having the hoop sideways, because I really wanted to maintain the size differences relative to the droids.
(I have to apologize for the photo quality - this was right as my previous camera was giving its last death rattles of non-focusing and weird lighting. Sadly, they were the only photos I got before I mailed them off to my swap partner)
Normally, I only ever use back stitch (what can I say? I'm a simple gal), but these pieces feature a whopping FOUR stitches - back stitch, satin stitch, french knots (which I can now officially say that I hate), and lazy daisy. This is the kind of dedication and involvement I have in creations for other people. I changed the coloring from Pulido's design to be reminiscent of the sugar skulls commonly associated with Dia de los Muertos.
Soon I will have some pictures of recent embroideries - and I mean it this time!
This weekend the Steel City Derby Demons are hosting an art auction fundraiser called A Black Eye Affair featuring art made by both local artists and some of the Derby Demons! Not to let my crafty skills go to waste, I made a contribution myself:
I made a quilt in this tahn's favorite colors! I have been dabbling in quilting a little bit lately - this is technically the second quilt I've ever made! It's just a basic strip quilt (which is already becoming my favorite basic I-want-to-make-a-quilt-in-a-short-amount-of-time quilt pattern). My mother was quite instrumental in acquiring all of the supplies for me - there was a Joann's going out of business near her so she went and reaped all the benefits of the sales. Fortunately, my mother is a native Pittsburgher, so she knew what I meant when I said that I needed gold fabric, not just yellow.
For the backing, I just decided to go with black, but I quilted the whole thing in gold thread so there's some interesting contrast on the back. I embroidered a little name patch - using a supposedly washable transfer pen that was, in fact, not washable (grrr!) - that I think came out well. Lots of tiny details = lots of tiny stitches. The whole quilt is roughly 42" by 55" - it's the perfect size for sitting on trackside at the next bout or perhaps huddling under during a December game of that football team everyone here seems to like so much.
So, if you're a local reading this and you're looking for something to do on Saturday, come on out to the Black Eye Affair! Good food, drinks, arts, derby folk - and you can feel awesome knowing that your contribution goes to helping out a group of amazing female athletes and the rest of the crew of the Steel City Derby Demons!
Living in Dayton, OH for a huge chunk of my life I love the Wright Brothers (also all things aviation). Both Erica and I worked for Wright Patterson AFB, went to Wright State, etc... Two months ago Erica found a shirt for me in the most amazing print.
How could I pay tribute to such honored men on this shirt that Cosmo Kramer would be proud to sport?
Erica did the design work and I was in charge of the sewing. I missed a line in one of the hats but they look pretty old timey and cool in my book.
This is my second "historical gentleman" series of shirts. Honest Abe was the first.
Look at that ugly face, mine. I think this is the better of the two shirts. Still thinking of who the third entry in the series is going to be... Hemmingway? Patton? Capote? George Lucas? Harrison Ford?
