Cutting the Cards

Sometimes the baby sleeps, and while the baby sleeps, I Get Stuff Done.

Sometimes that Stuff is crafty:

I want to say something clever about a bushel, but honestly I'm exhausted.

These little ornaments are a lot of fun to make, once you have the hang of it (it took me about three tries before I stopped consistently derping them up.)  Here, have some process photos!

Cut into 1/2" strips and ready to go!

When I first started doing them, I didn't really pay attention to the pattern my cards were making: I was too busy focusing on the actual craft part to worry about design.  Which means that for the first few I only needed three cards per ornament, to get my fifteen strips.  By the time I did this one, however, I'd gotten fancy, which means I sliced up like five or six cards to cherry-pick the strips, and also used sixteen rather than fifteen, to get an even repeat on the pattern.

Pierced, strung, knotted, and fanned! (looking at it from the "back")

 This has been a fantastic way for me to use up my scraps of embroidery thread!

Now comes the tricky part... thread from the top of the stack to the bottom... and curve!

 This was something I screwed up multiple times in the beginning.

This is, obviously, not the same ornament.  Tra la la...

This is the hardest part: keeping the strips curved as you thread the next one.  I had to step away from this ornament in the middle of the process (someone woke up and needed attention) and it held its shape well enough for me to snap a photo of it.

You can make them more flat...

...or less flat...

...or even LESS flat to the point that it looks like...

...a lovely seashell!

So that's what I've been up to, lately.

Don't Be Afraid

Today was a non-stop sort of day, beginning with my Office Holiday Party and ending with my Regional Holiday Party, both of which I had a hand in planning and implementing.

They were fun, but I'm super-amazingly glad they're done.

For the Office Party I dressed up as Mrs. Claus (for pictures with the kids), and to while away the time between groups of people showing up (it was sort of an Open House format) I partook in a suitably Mrs. Claus-y pass time, which is to say embroidering yet another bib:

...to fall for me

The friends I'm making this one for are climbers, hence the knot motif.  And just so you know, free-handing knot work remains a pain the petticoated-rear.

Fresh, for Now

Still plugging away at bibs for my passel of pregnant ladies.  I started this one while I was still pregnant- finished it, well, tonight.  I had to put it aside for quite some time, and honestly I sort of vacillated between resentment and tenderness as I worked on it (and the other one that bridged the now-you're-pregnant-now-you're-not spectrum).  I do, however, feel that they are weirdly therapeutic, and anyway I'm quite pleased with the end results, so that's all for the good.

Can't lie.

I have only one more of these bad boys (the fifth) to turn out for 2014, and then one lined up for early 2015- but I won't have to worry about that one for many months.  In the meantime, I'm sure I'll find other, less sensitive projects to keep me busy...

A Good Dog

Another bib:

(this one's due next month!)

Cozy

My mom and I went out for to lunch today, and as we were walking down Main Street we came across this bit of whimsy:

(obviously this tree is a Gryffindor)

In a Row

As you know, embroidering bibs is a Thing I Do when people I care about manage to Spawn.  It's been a while since I've done one (over a year, to be exact) but 2014 is looking to make up for that drought, because not one or two or three, or even four, but five, count 'em five ladies whom I love have gone and got themselves knocked up.  One after the other!

For real ladies, what is in that water?

As such, you can expect a fairly steady stream of stitchery to feature on the blog over the next few months...

(The best part is, because there's five of you fertile Myrtles, you have no way of knowing which is intended for whom.  Hah!)

Piercing

It was a rage-y sort of day, and for no good reason.

I was in a good mood this morning, but sometime around eleven it all came crashing down, down, down.  Actually the emphasis should be on crashing, because that's the sort of rage it was.  Violent rage.  And again- for no particular reason, let alone a good one.

The mood was not helped by my lunch break, which was spent dashing home to let the dog out (because Nathan, who typically works from home, is out of town).  Letting the dog out (and feeding her lunch) wasn't so bad- no, what kicked me into "I'm going to strangle this stupid animal" mode was that she finally got wise to the liverwurst trick.  So rather than take her flea medicine (which I really need her to do, because I found fleas on the cat last night) she just ate all the liverwurst and spat the pill back out.

Multiple times.

(Please don't give me any tips on how to get her to take her pill- as I told multiple people today, "Let's just assumed I've already tried everything and am still really pissed off.")

So.  My mood worsened, and I returned to work, and continued to feel general hatred towards humanity, the world, and just everything for the next two or three hours, at which point I just felt exhausted.  I'd already decided that I wasn't going to go climbing, since I was pretty sure that the only thing that would accomplish was me being bitchy towards people who love me.

...buuuuut I ended up going anyway, because Nathan mentioned I might feel better if I had chocolate, and I thought, "...maybe," and then I thought, "I can get a gluten-free cookie on the way to the gym, and if I don't feel any better I can just say hello and then leave.  And even if I don't leave, I'll only climb easy routes, so that I won't get frustrated."

(There is a kind of rage that can be constructively channeled into a challenge: this was not that.  This was the kind of rage that just gets further inflamed by a challenge.)

So I walked to the gym and got my cookie (and was grudgingly pleased that the cafe owner remembered me), and had a nice chat with a fellow climber who was also in a Pissed Off Mood, and we decided maybe it was a combination of last week's solar flare and tomorrow's full moon, because why not?

And then I found Bridge, and I'm pretty sure it's because he's a cat owner that he knows how to handle bitchy females by giving them their space and letting them be pissy, because he did that.  And I climbed my easy warm-up route, and then, because I was like, "I don't even efifn' care," I tried my current project.

I fell on the first attempt, in the exact same spot I've been falling in for the past week or so, but Bridge didn't try to give me any advice: he just let me swing back and forth, finding my breath and contemplating my movements.  And then I just... did it.  Very calmly, very smoothly.  I reached the top and he lowered me down, and there was this beautiful techno music playing so I closed my eyes and let myself be lost in the smell of chalk and the feel of the rope, and I felt infinitely better about life.

("You always feel better when you climb," says my husband, and he's right.)

So yeah.  It was a good climbing session.

I came home and did some cleaning (which also helps me feel better about life), and then I settled down to work on some embroidery,

It's not what you think it is... or is it?

I feel like the alone time helped as much as anything else... and now it's time for bed.

Firebird

Sometimes I just start stitching because I want to, and I don't really know where it's going to take me.  The last time that happened (in February, actually), it went a little like this:

"Hmm, I want to stitch, but I'm done Valentine's Day is over.  What else could I stitch now?  It might be fun to do one of my angels with the illuminated wings... hmm, illuminated wings... I'll bet it would be nice to stitch a firebird!"

And so I drew a little firebird on a piece of card stock, and started to stitch:

Burn.

Simple simple line-work, in the beginning, lots of long graceful lines to follow.  For the colors I decided that I wanted to work in shades of flame (obviously), but that I would treat the bird's body as the hottest part of the flame, and therefore white (twined with pale yellow) and then get darker the further out I went.

A lovely effect.

Such a nice gradient!  I got the subtle color changes by using three threads and slowly substituting one shade after another.  You can see it most obviously in the third feather from the left- I used a pale orange, a salmon, and a scarlet for that one.  Anyway once the main line work was done, I needed to go back in to the feathers and do the details...

Which I did.

That shot also shows you where I started adding extra flourishes, and how I draw the lines in pencil and then punch holes in the card stock using the needle.  But still more flourishes were needed!

Traces of gray, for smoke.

So I added those flourishes, and filled in the world "burn" while I was at it, but I knew that still more flourishes were needed!

More!  We need more!

In the end it turned out like this:

An Official Portrait, by Nathan.

And the back looked like this:

Awesomely ordered chaos.

And if you would like get a better sense of the scale of this thing:

Too much red!  Blowing out my phone's sensors!

And here are two more Nathan photos for more detail work:

Can you see the barest touch of blue I used in her eye?

Ha hah, who forgot to erase pencil lines before letting Nathan take photos?  THISGIRL.

So that's what I occasionally do with my time- freehand something onto a piece of card stock, and then stitch the hell out of it.  Wheee!  All in all it took me... three days, I think?  But they were highly satisfying days.

The Making of a Bib

Or, rather, not the making of the bib, per se, but the embellishing of it.

Tricks of the Trade

Last week I promised you a Process Blog, and this week I make good on that promise.  As I've mentioned before, I make bibs for people when they have babies.  And since my brother's firstborn is due in less than a month, I figured I'd better get started on the bib for my newest nephew.

It starts, as these things do, with an idea (Yes, I've been planning this since August.  Sometimes I am slow.)  Once I know what illustration I want to use, I freehand it onto the bib using an air-erase marker:

There is a reason for the patch.  A darkly humorous reason.

And then I pick out my colors, and begin to stitch.  In this instance I decided I wanted a gray and cream bunny (the colors of my childhood stuffed animal), with dark blue script (since my brother is Air Force).

Here is an idea of how long the actual stitching takes me:

80 minutes in

160 minutes in

240 minutes in (yes, that's four hours, and not consecutive because I'd go blind.)

Now at this point I knew I wanted a vegetable next to the bunny.  Originally I'd sketched in a carrot (you can just barely make it out in the 80 minutes in shot), but it seemed to me that you don't have to be particularly brave to try a carrot.  A radish, on the other hand...

Notice there is no trace of the carrot I'd drawn the day before.  Air eraseable marker, you are THE AWESOMEST.

The first few times I embroidered something, I made iron-on transfers out of my drawings, but now I find it much easier and faster just to draw directly on the fabric- and since I make a habit of doing my doodles in pen, I'm comfortable working that way, and generally end up with pretty clean lines (see above).

This is how much thread I used to do those two little green leaves.  It is also how much thread it ended up taking me to do the last, large leaf.

All in all, it took me six hours (360 minutes) to finish, which isn't so bad.

The compass star is to guide brave little bunnies home again.

The backside.  Not the messiest I've ever done, but I'm sure I could be cleaner, given more time and practice.

My handsome modeling cat.

It was good to be stitching again- it had been almost a year since the last time I did something, and it's really put me in the mood to do more.  It may be that I do stitched valentines this year... hmmm...

The Seeker

Just to prove to you that I am still getting my non-specific doodle on:

My (cheap) brush pen is running out of ink.

Furthermore, I am working a new stitchery project, and I've been taking pictures as I go so that I can share a little process with you once it's finished.  Huzzay!

Twins and Things

 Some friends of mine are having twins, and, as you know, I am in the habit of giving a certain kind of gift when people have babies.  Twins meant doing some sort of matchy-matchy thing (inevitable, really), but since I am not a matchy-matchy person, myself, I had to stretch my brain a bit- and then it hit me:

I ran the idea past Nathan, and it made him laugh so I knew I had a winner.  Here's how they turned out:

And thus I give you gender-neutral, twin-appropriate, non-gag-inducing baby shower gifts.  Truly, I am a frickin' genius.  (Or, rather, Seuss is, and I'm just a frickin' genius at appropriation...)