Positive Reinforcement....and a Challenge

So I have been really cranky lately.

Well, crankier than usual.

Luckily enough for everyone who has to deal with me on a daily basis, I found this pattern (well, part of a pattern) and decided to hang it over my bathroom mirror.  Sometimes a fella just needs something to make him feel a little bit better in the morning...

The original was in pink and yellow, but I decided to change it to match my towels,  (Plus, I come off girly enough that I really don't need something pink in my bathroom.)

I'm actually really happy with it, and it seems to do the trick.

Now here's the challenge...  It is actually from a much bigger pattern:

You really can't see all of it because of the limited capabilities of my camera.  Anyways, it says stuff like "Nice to See You!" and "It's Been Too Long."  Normally, I would loathe this kind of thing, but I like the fonts and all.  The thing is, it's f'ing huge.  And then the directions say they want you to put backing on it, sew some dowels into it and make it a "Warm Welcome Banner!"  (The exclamation points are not my own.) To all of this I say, "Probably not."


It also says the estimated time to finish is THREE HUNDRED HOURS.  That sounds like much less of a craft project and more of a community service sentence.  




But we shall see...  I'll try to take a picture of the whole shebang to get your opinions.  And if I do decide to start on it, I'll do my best to make it the biggest "Stitch Along with Stump" ever! (exclamation point my own.)

Stitch, Neely, Stitch...or... Valley of the Demanding Relatives

So, my cousin messaged me with a special request.  Normally, I would have just laughed derisively and told him to move on.  Because that's the kind of fella I am.  A real sweetheart. Unfortunately, I agreed to take on his little project because a) it was funny and b) he is family.  So what do you do?

You see his girlfriend found this pillow on a hideously overpriced but cool web page.  We shall call it MonathanMadler.com.  It is really cool, but almost $100.

Who am I to turned down a Valley of the Dolls reference?  No one, I say.

Oddly enough, it turns out my cousin's girlfriend had never seen Valley of the Dolls.  She just thought it was funny.

Anyhoo....I told him I could try out a version of it with what I had lying around the house.  Oh, and I don't do pillows.  However, I did have some old bathroom towels I bought on sale at JoAnn's about 2 years ago for an aborted Christmas project.  Would she like one of them instead.  His (lack of) excitement was palpable, but I decided to forge ahead anyways.  Especially since it wasn't going to really cost me anything.

I took these pictures with my phone, so not the best quality.  Just pretend you have been popping dolls...

I tried to make it look like the pill on the end was broken and spilling out into the other side,.  Just like on the old Contact cold medicine commercials.

Here is the whole shebang with the exciting pill border.  I wish I could have found a better font.  But I still like it.

And here it is from afar.  I do think it hilarious.  And a nice reminder on those days you just don't feel like heading to work....

Here is the trailer for the movie in case you are totally lost...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLS3_t1cATM

Forward to about 1:10 for the actual scene the towel references.

Oh well...hope she likes it.


PS  Just to show you how weird I erally am (like you need that), I once went to a Valley of the Dolls party in college.  I made a pill-shaped pink cake and wrote "Sparkle!" on it in icing.  Then I threw TicTacs all over it.  Huge success.  Just a tip for your next Patty Duke themed affair!

Let's Pretend I Didn't Just Disappear, Shall We

Hi Kids!

I know it has been awhile, but lets pretend you are all Pamela Ewing on Dallas: Original Recipe and I am Bobby.  I was just hanging out in the shower, organizing my floss (naked) waiting for you to wake up from your very deep sleep.

It was all a bad dream.  I am fine.  I am still stitching on occasion.

Just pipe the fuck down, already!

Here....let me show you something I made at Christmas to prove it is still me....

I made 10 of these to give out as Christmas cards.  I wanted to do something funny but not vulgar (a stretch as you all know,,, I nearly pulled a hamstring) and Christmas-y but not annoying.  And as anyone who has looked at a cross stitch book in the past few decades knows, that is pretty limiting.  No ducks in Santa hats, please.  No bears in scarves.  No fat baby angels. (what did all those kids die of anyways?  Creepy).  These were my rules.

So, I wound up with this idea.  And it is probably going over as well with you as it did for those who got them in real life.  "Well, Brent...this is a very nice....alphabet?  Why isn't there an "L?"

There's no L.

No L

Well, I thought it was funny at the time.

Merry Belated Christmas, pals.

Let Them Eat Cupcakes

Well, Bobs and Betties, I realize that it has been eons since I have posted anything.

Mostly because I have been just flat out brain lazy for about a year. I am blaming it on getting older. Unfortunately, the truth is that Bravo keeps putting on far too many "Housewife" shows. It is a practically a full time job to keep up with them.

Still lying.

Its just been awhile since I have made anything I liked enough to share with you all.

This weekend in a rare spasm of creativity (ouch!), I decided to peruse a stack of patterns I copied out of this book I checked out of my local library...





Its a very nice book even though the title makes me gag. A Rainbow of Stitches? Puke.

The authors are French, so they are very familiar with Fromage. Bien Sur!

Anyways, the actual patterns inside are very nice and easy. They manage to be both modern looking and sort of retro at the same time. (This is why I do not work for any sort of reputable review journal). They are also simple enough to complete in a few hours.

I would buy this book and use it all of the time. I'll just have to make a better title for it.

Hardcore Crosstitch Psycho-Bitches?

Embroidery for World Domination?

So here is what I made this weekend...


See what I mean? Sort of modern? Sort of retro? Like the sign for one of those annoyingly trendy cupcake bakeries on "Cupcake Wars?"




Of course, I couldn't just leave well enough alone...



Well, that's all I have for today.

I will try to be more vigilant in the future.

PS... While I was looking on Amazon for the cover of "A Rainbow of Stitches" (gag), I saw a book of patterns based on Ed Hardy designs. This brought to mind the question, "In the great Venn Diagram of humanity... how large is the intersection of 'crafter' and 'Douchebag?'"

Stitch Along With Stump: Love, Indifferently

First of all, my loves, this is NOT, I repeat NOT, the ugliest cross stitch in craftdom I promised to show off last week. I got sidetracked this weekend by some other stuff (including this one). I say this because I had an image of posting this and having several posts saying, "Hey- that really is the ugliest cross stitch I have ever seen. No joke." Trust me...you will know.

I lived in Philadelphia for a hot minute back in the early Nineties. One of the few things I remember (I think I was sober for a good 17.5 minutes back then, and those minutes were not sequential.) was Robert Indiana's "LOVE" statue in the aptly named LOVE Park in center city. It was very near where I would get the bus from my disgusting job, so I would use it as a landmark on those nights when I was...um...impaired. It was hard to miss.

The next picture is my favorite of Indiana's variations of his "LOVE" pieces...



When I first found out about on-line pattern makers (the one I use can be found here: http://www.patternsforyou.com/en/pattern_maker.html ) one of the first things I ran through it was this picture. I just always liked it, and I thought the fact it was in black and white would make it a bit easier. Turns out, no. For the black and white picture above, the pattern maker came back with a chart that included over thirty different DMC colors.

When I printed it out, it looked like this...

The nice things about it are that it has a nice stitch count on the side and it does give you the DMC colors required.

The bad thing is that it can be really hard to read. I think I would try it on a color printer next time. It was a little hard to read.

Here's what I have so far...


As usual, I have no idea how I feel about it yet. There is a huge mistake going on in the upper right part of the "O." I might just repair that, and then leave it as a single thing instead of doing the other four quarters.

What I like about it, so far, is that I decided to do the negative space instead of the positive (ooooh...smell me with my art fart terms and whatnot). I think if I do decide to keep going with it, I'll make do the letters of the top two so it looks like a rubber stamp and the actual stamp.

Eh, who knows.

Thoughts?

Seriously Ugly. Seriously.

Just to keep the literally tens of you out there who actually pay attention to what I am doing on here in suspense for the weekend...

I am currently working on what might be the ugliest cross stitch project I have ever done. Seriously. There is just no getting around it.

I found a small pattern in a really nice book ("A Rainbow of Stitches" if you are curious) filled with really nice projects and things. It really is a gorgeous (and I don't use that word often) book.

I found this small pattern that just looked so awesome in the pictures. I had some oddly colored Aida to use and chose an odd color of DMC floss I was sure would do well together. I even had a funny little phrase and a font all picked out for it.

Worked on it for about an hour and a half before I realized how truly unattractive it is.

I am going to finish it though, just to show it to you all.

I'll try to get it done while i am doing laundry on Sunday.

Seriously ugly. Seriously.

Stitch Along with Stump: Still Sweet, Less Sticky... But is it Done?

And so, another project comes to an end. Sort of.

I have two issues with the completed work here:

1. I really should have used five strands of floss as called for in the directions. I shall ne'er doubt the ancient wisdom of Ondorisha again. The thicker strands would have really made it all pop even more on the black background and would have made it that much more wacky and over the top.

2. I really sort of love it. I love the colors and am glad I did it on the black background. It almost makes it look like some sort of stylized Japanese LED display. An ad for a candy shop in Blade Runner. (Yeah Brent...butch it up. Butch that candy shop cross stitch you did right the fuck up with a Blade Runner reference.) As I said before, my original plan was to stitch the Ondarisha pharmacy right next to it, but now I'm not sure. We'll see. Not everything has to be a joke, I guess.





There were times it was a huge pain in the ass to do. Lots of little color switches and whatnot. It was especially perturbing in the area with the long jars because I'll be damned sometimes if I could figure out the difference between two of those shades of pink or the subtle shading of white and the lightest blue possible. It probably would have been more pronounced if I had just FOLLOWED THE DAMNED DIRECTIONS. (Mother? Is that you?)

All in all, I really and fond of it. Again, not sure what to do with it.

And yes, everyone, I promise to iron it soon.

And for those of you who have been waiting for two weeks for the great mystery to end.... here is the part of the directions where it said TIT a lot, and here is how that are turned out.



Ha! Tit. Never not funny.