Of Gnomes and Doctors
I do not profess to be either good or speedy at cross-stitch. I generally leave the cross-stitch pieces to my mother (who is very good, and far speedier than I am) but not too long ago I came across some great, simple pieces on etsy that have called out to me. One of these is currently in progress, the other is finished and sent off to a swap partner.
First, the finished. I cannot resist a fat-bellied gnome, and this one from sewingseed is particularly glorious. I happen to have a great deal of natural colored linen fabric that I trimmed from the bottom of some IKEA drapes; I believe I cut about 18" off the bottom of each panel which left far more fabric than I felt comfortable throwing away! I used a small piece of this fabric to stitch the gnome on. Once it was done I gave it a quick wash and press and turned it into a wee fat-bellied gnome sachet:
I stuffed it with some lavender that I've kept stored in an air-tight container; I harvested and dried it the first summer we lived here, when we discovered that I'm horribly allergic to it. Very short bursts of exposure don't bother me too much so I threw the buds inside, sewed it closed and tucked it straight into the mail. The sewing was super quick and easy, but the stitching took me about 6 hours because I might just be the slowest stitcher ever.
My work in-progress is for my husband. We're both big fans of Doctor Who so when I came across this Pixel People lineup of all 11 Doctors by weelittlestitches I knew that it was something that he had to have for his very own. I'm a little bit further along than this image:
I've since stitched the 8th doctor in too, so I have 7 doctors left before I can wash, press and frame it. My one regret is that two of the doctors have a fair bit of un-outlined white and I chose white 14-count aida cloth to stitch it on so I might have to figure out how to help those doctors stand out from the background a little bit better.
A note about some great service I received getting set up to start these projects. I bought most of my initial supplies at Mindy's Needlepoint here in Eugene where I was treated with great respect despite my lack of knowledge about what I was buying. I was given a recommendation about what needle size was correct for what I was doing and got some great help in finding all of my floss colors. Two thumbs up.
An Instant Gratification Project; Knitting Punctuation.
I love a good semicolon; the way it transitions from one sentence into another without a hard, hard pause. When I saw this pattern for a comma, apostrophe or quotation marks I was smitten. As I was showing my husband the nearly finished item, he smiled and told me that I "should knit it a friend and make it a semicolon; I use semicolons at work a lot". And so the seed was planted and with just a little wrangling of the pattern I had made the comma's spherical friend and joined them into the beautiful semicolon.
Now I have this crazy idea to knit an interrobang, but I think it might be better suited to colorwork than to a softie.
Nearly Wordless Wednesday: Ice Invaders
I bought my husband this Ice Invaders
Using my Powers for Good
It sometimes surprises people but the boarding school I was lucky enough to attend during my final two years of high school was focused on math and science. While I did not love calculus, I generally love numbers and math and puzzles and figuring out how things all fit together. When I'm knitting lace patterns I tend to set up spreadsheets to calculate my progress through the project and my recent project--Clothilde, a Knitting Kninja pattern--was no exception. This came in handy when I was trying to decide if I had enough yarn to add a second repeat of chart two to the edging.
Using my spreadsheet I calculated the number of stitches in the first repeat. Before I began knitting this repeat I weighed my ball of yarn, finding that I had 33 grams left. I knit the repeat and weighed again. 20 grams. The number of stitches in the remaining repeat and the bind off was approximately 135% larger than the first repeat. 135% of 13 grams is 18 grams, so the math told me that I'd have enough yarn to finish the shawl the way I wanted. Because I am cautious, I inserted a lifeline in my knitting and forged ahead. And wouldn't you know it? I ended up with 2 grams left over, a whopping 7 yards of yarn. It's like magic when the math works out like that, only you know, with proof and reasoning to back it up.
Next to an out-of-focus quarter for scale. I don't normally like to cut it so close with my yarn remainders but I love using up all of my yarn. It's so gratifying.
Possessive Kitteh
I think she and I need to have a talk about who the macbook really belongs to. Clearly she disagrees with my assessment that it is mine.