A public space for friends and family to keep up with me.

Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Craft Invader



Special Tuesday Post: Skipping Threads to Save Money

On Christmas day I was very excited. I got an embroidery machine and that was awesome. However, there was one thing that wasn't awesome: I didn't have a job. Not having a job meant that I couldn't run out and buy tons of patterns and thread and supplies and all of the accessories needed to use an embroidery machine. Along with some stabilizer they did buy a few basic colors: green, white, red, black, gray, and brown.

Hey, those are some good colors, so I rushed to Urban Threads, the site that made me drool over machine embroidery in the first place. There were so many amazing designs that I wanted, but I made sure to limit myself to only a few. There was one that I could not resist to save my life.

Bite Me


I'm a vampire lover. I love vamps of all shapes and sizes and personalities and origin. One thing I didn't take into account was that this design required 7 different colors. Seven!! I surely didn't have money to buy those colors, so I vowed to forget about the pattern. I wanted it out of my mind, but it refused to leave. I wanted to do it so much, so I decided to improvise.

Since Christmas I have acquired some more thread colors, but nothing more than what I need, and nothing that can't be used on a number of different projects. I still haven't gotten anything on that list, and now I don't plan to. I decided to just skip over the colors I didn't have and use gray and white for all teeth sections.

Close-up of Bite Me


And I think it turned out great! The flash shows the brilliant red, and in person the separate teeth easily seen. I'm so glad I can now use this design that I've kept hidden in a folder for the last month.

Bite Me

Monday, January 25, 2010

Crafty Monday: 24 Hours of Stitching

I have an unfinished cross stitch project. This project has been barely touched since I started it in October. Yes, really. It is driving me crazy to not have it done, and guilt keeps me from starting any other cross stitch projects.

This weekend I finally decided to do something about it. Connie, who does the cross stitch section of about.com, shared this post which talks about a 12 hour Stitchathon. I thought it was a perfect idea and jumped right onto that bandwagon.

Of course, I forgot to consider my "getting carried away" trait. Like that time I only meant to make one or two quilt blocks for The Linus Connection but ended up with an entire quilt top, or that time I meant to make t-shirts for my brothers-in-law for x-mas but ended up making t-shirts for everyone, or when I was going to make just a couple of blocks for Batiks on Black and I made way too many.

So my 12 hour stitchathon turned into 24 hours. Most of them were largely unproductive. I'm not blaming the pattern, but blaming my inability to see certain letters clearly. I had the worst time trying to find certain letters in a sea of HKNHKNKNNNNKKKKHHHH. This resulted in slow stitching times and a wonderful hour where I picked out a crapload of stitches. Anyway, here is the video!

Tuesday, January 12, 2010

Whoops...

last published on Dec 30, 2009


*cough*

I don't even know how that happened. I've just been minding my own business (see: playing with my embroidery machine), so this blog just went without being updated. I will stop being such a bad person and actually get to it!!

Talk to me Tuesda(y): Dud(e)



Talk to me Tuesday: Clean & Dirty