Bags, bags, bags

It's chaos and mayhem in casa Blaize at the moment, but the good kind - lots of redecorating and reorganizing, and in some cases just plain organizing of things that were never actually organized in the first place. And we have a new car, which facilitates lots of organizing but is also scary because I haven't driven in about eight years and need to relearn. But more importantly a car means a trip to Hobbycraft and buying supplies for the next few ridiculous craft projects, which is very exciting!

But until those crazy crafts are completed, have a post with some bags. These are a few of the pay it forward gifts I made last year, and there's some more stuff to come just as soon as I work through the backlog of unposted crafts!

Lend Me a Hand

The Dream is Real. And It Is Made of Cross Stitch

It's finally time for me to unveil my completed Inception cross stitch! I am terribly excited about showing this off, and I hope other people like it as much as I do!

I began thinking about this project around this time last year, but didn't start stitching until towards the end of June. It took me a long time before I was happy with any of the umpty jillion patterns I tried and discarded. I noodled around with several screengrabs and whatnot of the hotel corridor fight for quite sometime before settling on doing the Arthur poster image, mainly because it had a wider range of colours than using a scene directly from the movie. I was finished the actual stitching part by the middle of November so it would seem that I keep taking around five months to do one of these cross stitches o' doom, regardless of the size of the project. (For reference, Arthur is over twice the size and contains over three times the number of stitches as my stitched Serenity, and almost double the stitches of the Enterprise one.)

At no point did I get frustrated with this project, which is a novelty to me. Not even a minor pout or kerfuffle. I can't decide if that's the reason this has been my favourite project so far, or if it is genuinely the best thing I've made. I've certainly never stitched better. The stitches and the tension are much more uniform across the piece than I've ever achieved in the past.

Here come the stats! The stitched design measures 22cm by 29cm. It contains 31,108 stitches from 25 different colours of thread. I used nearly 150 metres of those threads, and almost 50 meters of that is the very dark navy that dominates the piece.

So. Yeah. This happened.

Trekkie goodies

As I transfer pictures and patterns and other random files to my shiny new computer I've discovered loads of stuff that I've made and not yet posted any pics of. So working through the backlog should keep me busy for a while, which is quite nice - I was worried I'd have nothing interesting to post until I'd finished any of the umpty-billion half completed and then abandoned craft projects I have cluttering up the place!

So to start out the year, here's the gift I sent for the ontd-startrek secret santa.







And to keep up the Star Trek theme, I was asked if I would share my Star Fleet insignia cross stitch patterns, so if you want to stitch any of these...



...then here's the pattern! (Click to embiggen.)



This entry was originally posted at http://anonymityblaize.dreamwidth.org/59136.html.