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!

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