Accessorize the Apocalypse

Nerd Alert!

Terrifying Space Monkeys! Or perhaps just cross stitch patterns

Anyone remember when I made this lovely cross stitch o' doom?

Well, some crazy brave soul was interested in making one of their own, so here's the pattern for it.

My Inception cross stitch is still ongoing, and coming out rather nicely. Have finally worked out my issues with pale colours - it turns out to be a rather simple issue, basically it's easier to see errors in the pale coloured stitches whereas your eyes just see the dark stitches as plain blocks of colour and you don't notice if the tension's a bit wonky or the stitch isn't lined up perfectly. But armed with this knowledge I'm now attacking the pale portions a little differently, which may end up making a world of difference. That probably only I will notice. I'm a fool to myself when it comes to the ol' cross stitch!



And some more pics under the cut of how Arthur's been going.

Stitchety stitchy stitch

My Inception cross stitch continues to trundle on apace. Eight out of sixteen pages of the pattern are complete now! But it's more like 3/4 of the way done. And I've still not reached a stage of rage yet! It's clearly a magical cross stitch project.

More pics of progress leading up to now under the cut.

Teal Deer, Literally

1 Up!

Cross stitch o' doom progress

It's all very exciting. It might still be ages until it's completed, but it's coming along very nicely. Am still rather suspicious about that.

Let us scroll backwards through stitching-time!

Another Buffy Treasury!

Geek Lamp 2: Electric Boogaloo

After I made my own geekiest lamp in all of geekdom a friend of mine (the very friend who lent me his Enterprise D blueprints) commissioned me to make him a table lamp with an Enterprise design. Took me ages to find a lamp I could customise and then ages again to actually decide which bit of the ship to put on it, but I really like what I ended up with, so maybe all that time was worth it! Here's how it turned out:

I had a plan. It was a good plan, but i got bored

Geek Chic

Despite all my current woes IRL, my cross stitch seems to be going very well indeed. I am deeply suspicious of it. I'm sure it has some cunning plan to annoy me tucked up its sleeve...

Ho Ho Hope

Here's some more cross stitch progress. I am rather excited now that Arthur is mostly done, and you can even see most of the guy falling away behind him. And I've reached both the right and left hand edges now. It's moving on quite quickly. Hurrah!



Earlier in the week:

Geeky Cross Stitch

Geek-topia

I am utterly bemused by the world right now. Blah blah blah, woe is me, etc etc.No-one wants to hear another blogger moaning on the internet!

Also probably of no interest to anyone is the continuing adventure of my Inception cross stitch. But it's so incredibly useful to me to be able to look back through these posts and see how far it's come on in such a short space of time. Arthur appears to be the one part of my life not mocking me right now! So, spammed with images of his progress y'all shall be, whether you like it or not!

I'm thinking there are a few bits I may want to go back over at some point - maybe blend a few colours a little better, perhaps add some backstitching around Arthur to better define his arms from the background. But on the whole I'm really pleased with how this is shaping up.

Yaay! My Inception cross stitch is coming on in leaps and bounds, as is only fitting. I need to take it out of the frame to get pictures now, which is encouraging. You can see a bit of Arthir's head now, and his gun, and I was very excited to realise I've already reached out to the left hand edge. I need to go order some more of the darkest blue thread though - I've already used nearly a whole skein of it, and I'll apparantly use nearly 60 metres of just that colour in the whole piece. Eeep. The angry-making stage of large cross stitch project procedings must be just around the corner...

Maybe this project will be different and I'll lov it the whole way through. Maybe.

Anyway, right now, it's awesome.



Here's how it looked over the weekend:

Like this!

"Forget you" wouldn't fit. Also, it doesn't scan right.

Liklihood of me murdering a builder: rising.

Ways in which this wee cross stitch makes me smile: many.

This is my new totem of staying calm. I'm going to mount it behind my work space when I actually have one of those again.

The pattern's adapted from a few twee wee samplers.







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This entry was originally posted at http://anonymityblaize.dreamwidth.org/52107.html.

Star Trek crafts: I Wish I Knew How To Quit You

I may have made a few too many cross stitched Star Trek badges here. I didn't mean to fill a whole sheet of cross stitch fabric with them, but somehow I did. I'd just add another one every so often when I was between projects, and then somehow I ended up with twenty of them (these are just the ones that came out best!). A worrying number of my projects lately have felt somewhat involuntary. I am possessed by some strange spirit of craftiness. Weird.

Anyway, have some Star Trek insignia. They're all on 58mm (2 1/4") badges. And if anyone wants a pattern for any of these just ask!

Fandom Awesomitude

Gradually catching up on messages and emails and comments and all the wonders of the interwebs. And so here's some more crafty stuff.

The fabulous akisilver and the wonderful epicycles were my winning bidders for the LJ Help Japan  auction and both asked for very exciting stuff.

So I got to make a kitschy Doctor Who sampler:

 And a steampunk Hetalia badge:

Both projects were great fun to work on, and all for a good cause. Many hurrahs!


This entry was originally posted at http://anonymityblaize.dreamwidth.org/51169.html.

Bitching and Stitching

So, five days with minimal access to the internet seems to do weird things to my head. I am a data junkie, it's appalling. But now that BT have replaced a THIRD section of busted wiring hopefully our landline will hold it together for longer than a few months this time. And if O2 could find a way to persuade 3G signals to penetrate the apparently hefty walls of my building then I would actually be able to communicate with the outside world with all my stupid devices just like their bloody adverts claim. Anyway...

Just five days away has left me with a lot to catch up on, and a backlog of things to post, but on the upside I did get a lot of cross stitching done the past few days so you can actually see some bits of Arthur now. Hurrah!

(ETA: The aforementioned internet issues meant I didn't post the first few updates on this cross stitch project here at blogger. You can see those posts over at my LJ here)



Some pics of the days in between under the cut.

Powerpuff Pattern

A few people over on my LJ seemed interested in stitching their own Powerpuff Girls piece so here's the pattern for it! I've changed a few wee details here and there since I stitched my own version to make it (I hope) even better.

If anyone would like me to post patterns for any of my other cross stitch pieces please let me know and I'll see what I can do! (I reserve the right to maybe be a bit precious about the giant cross stitches o' doom as they're very personal to me, but quite frankly I don't think anyone's mad enough to want to do them anyway.) Check out my Flickr tag for all my cross stitch stuff.

Feel free to do whatever you want with it, but credit or a link back here would be much appreciated. And if anyone does stitch this I'd love to see it!

So, if you wanna stitch this:

Then here's your pattern under the cut (click to embiggen):

Sugar and Spice... and Everything Nice

I've been going through a bit of a creative cranky period the last few months. I've got about eight potential projects on the go, but no completed patterns. So a few weeks ago I decided to just do something fun, and I figured something with limited colours would be easier to work up a pattern for and much less headache-y to stitch. And I was so right.

I stitched 6931 stitches, made up of 35 metres of 9 different colours of thread in just over two weeks. In comparison, the Serenity cross stitch was only a little over a thousand stitches more, and yet it took me nearly six months. That's a ridiculous variance of stitching speed! Clearly, fewer colours means much easier stitching, and the magic cross stitch fabric helped too (more on that later).

So, here's a Powerpuff Girls cross stitch made of joy and stress-free stitching!

A close up, because I am so happy with this piece!

A work in progress pic, that is slightly freaky - Blossom looks like some kind of freaky zombie rabbit without the black outlining stitched in! But it does show off my new discovery - magic fabric. Guide lines already printed on the fabric that wash out when you're finished. Genius. It has made my life so much simpler. I will never stitch large projects on anything else ever again!

.

My handbag is going to die

Yaay! Normal service should be resuming on my internets soon - apparently the phone line coming into our building was composed mainly of rust, so no wonder it's been acting like dial up for months.

Today's crafty post is (yet another) Trekkie thingamabob. It's probably an idea that would have worked better on a red t-shirt, but I had a red beach bag and I wanted to do this, so to hell with logic!

   

Aaargh. Crush. Stomp

It seems quite appropriate to post this custom Bowser piece right now, as life pretty much feels like a hellishly difficult boss level at the moment. But this is pretty, and I'm rather proud of how it turned out. So here's 7 by 7 inches of cross stitchy Mario fun (buyer's tag pixellated for privacy).

Extreme close up! Because I am really happy with how neat my stitching is on this piece.

Crafts! Some random geeky bags!

These were made ages ago as colour tests for new paints. I should get them up on my etsy site soon - I've already got about half a dozen shopping bags of my own, what else am I going to do with them?!

Shiny!

The Geekiest Lamp in All of Geekdom

I had this floor lamp that I loved very much, but some of the panels had been damaged over the years, so I decided to cut all the panels out, replace the ones that were too badly ripped and salvage the ones that weren't. Maybe I'd add some small embellishments, I thought. Then it turned into an epic stencil project that took up all my crafts-for-me time throughout January and February. And then I discovered that it's really hard to take pictures of an item that is itself a source of light. Especially since when the lamp is off (or I tried to use the camera flash) you can't actually see any of the designs - it just looks like panels of plain paper. So this post has taken quite a while to get organised!

Because it's for me, it's a bit messy in places and I tried some techniques that I won't try again. But I actually quite like how it turned out, overall. I'm definitely going to try to use some of these ideas again for smaller table lamps I can sell, but that'll require quite a lot of research and planning!

The biggest problem I had with taking photos was the difference between the Bat signal panels and the other ones. With the naked eye there isn't as big a contrast as there are in these pics.

Or Things I Meant To Post Before Now, Part Two of Umpteen.

Working through my back log of things that couldn't be posted before Christmas, and first up is this wee back pack/tote bag. This was done with a combo of stencils for the stars and free hand painting for the swirls. There are three different colours of sparkly paint involved, but as per usual two of them look almost identical!

 

Also, January totally doesn't count towards the overall feeling of 2011, right? Because January is always a month of catching up and cleaning and cold and a to do list of doom and general miserableness, and this one's shaping up no different. But I can still look forward to the rest of the year being better, can't I? *crosses fingers*

I got featured in a few more treasuries on Etsy over Christmas and New Year and I thought I should share two of them with you. So much amazing stuff there - I keep having to remind myself that I'm there to sell stuff, not to buy!

So, there's a Mario treasury here:

(Take a gander at Hooby Groovy's whole range of cases and accessories - they are all just as fabulous as that Goomba iphone case.)

And a Star Trek one here:

(OMG those cushions. I want those cushions so much. Please check out Yellow Bug Boutique and marvel at her work. I want to buy ALL THE THINGS!)