My new cross-stitch supplies and patterns are sitting on my desk. That’s not a good place for them. If I leave them there, eventually I will lose something. Needles are particularly bad to lose, because of the painful ways in which they might be found later. My sewing box is small, so I can’t put the stuff there. My needlework bag would be ideal, but it already has a lot in it, including some unfinished projects.
There’s this unfinished project:
This cross-stitch project is close to being done. I haven’t worked on it in years, but the needle is still in the fabric, just waiting for me to pick it up again.
Also this one.
This was supposed to be a gift (a pair of matching pillowcases). The pile of unused embroidery floss makes the image sadder to me, because it symbolizes all the effort, expense, and hope spent on readying a project that I gave up on almost immediately.
I stopped to think about this for a while, and I’ve decided that the best thing to do is to make room in the bag by removing the old projects. For now, I will put them in my grandmother’s bag, next to her unfinished project. That sounds gloomy, because she’s dead and consequently never going to finish hers, but my goal is simply to put them somewhere safe, where they won’t be lost or damaged. There they will be also be in good company. My grandmother seemed to favor the simplicity of cross-stitch, but she could do fancier needlework, too, and prettily. And there they will not be a constant reminder to me of my unfinished tasks.
But, assuming I ever finish my current project, I should go back and either finish or dispose of the other two. Then I should either finish or dispose of my grandmother’s unfinished project, because yeah, it’s gloomy. Then I should finally clean and frame her two finished projects. My fear of accidentally ruining them is keeping me from enjoying them.
As I mentioned yesterday, I recently bought a set of Calamityware dishes. Calamityware looks like traditional willow ware, but each design includes things that are odd and/or calamitous, like robots, aliens, black holes, sea monsters, etc. I like it because it’s funny and a little bit rebellious. Since I’m planning to use the dishes mostly for Thanksgiving, I started looking online for Thanksgiving decorating ideas that would go well with willow blue. I came across some crafty websites with ideas for embroidering napkins. The designs were nice, but too traditional (read: boring).
But then it occurred to me, what if I were to create cross-stitch patterns to match my plates? I liked the idea of adding my own personal touch. Anybody can shop. Anybody with money can buy things. I don’t want to be just anybody.
I wasn’t sure I could pull it off, but I decided to give it a try. I took a photo of one of the plates, isolated one of the design elements and gridded it to use as a guide. I bought blue and white embroidery floss and a small embroidery hoop. I researched how to cross-stitch onto a fabric that doesn’t have easily counted threads. I found a technique that I thought might work, and I applied it to a cloth napkin that I happened to have lying around. Here is the result:
Zombie Poodle Cross-Stitch (based on a Calamityware design)
Silly me, I accidentally stitched the zombie poodle upside-down (its head is near the corner, but it ought to be the other way around), and the back of the piece (not shown) is a mess. I definitely need to practice. But I only stitched it as a proof of concept, and I wasn’t expecting it to look nearly as good as it does. Even my husband is impressed.
Steps For Finishing This Project:
Pick a material for the napkins. The options are linen, cotton, linen-cotton blend, cotton-polyester blend, and polyester. There are a lot of factors (look and feel, absorbency, durability, price, ease of care, etc.). The only thing I’m certain of is that I don’t want 100% polyester. I will need to buy quite a few napkins, so it’s a big decision.
Pick a color for the napkins. I’m leaning toward white, but my husband is leaning toward blue. The only thing I’m certain of is that we won’t pick mustard yellow (that’s the color of my practice napkin, and it happens to be one of my least favorite colors).
Maybe buy a different white embroidery floss. I probably won’t need a lot of white (the zombie poodle design has just that one large white X), but the floss I bought turned out to be polyester, and it’s unpleasant to work with.
Test the color-fastness of the blue floss. It’s probably fine, but better safe than sorry. I might run the napkin through a regular wash and dry to see how well it takes that treatment.
Practice! I had some problems with keeping my stitches even, anchoring the thread ends, and avoiding knots in the floss. I also managed to get my threads caught on the hoop-tightening mechanism several times. The back of a cross-stitch design is usually not an issue, but it will be for this project, because napkins get flipped over, and the stitches must be secured properly because napkins also get washed. I know perfection is unattainable, but there’s plenty of room for improvement.
Create more designs. I randomly picked the zombie poodle, and I think it’s awesome, but I don’t want all of the napkins to have zombie poodles on them. I want to have at least a few more designs, if not one for each plate.
My deadline is Thanksgiving. That seems like a long way away, but already January is over, and I’m in shock, as I always am, to see February come so quickly. I’d better hustle!
It started with the great room, where we painted the walls dark blue. Then the blue spread to our bedroom. Now the blues, creeping from one room to the next, have reached the kitchen and dining room via our new willowware dishes.
Calamityware Sea Monster Plate Each of the 12 Calamityware dinner plate designs has a different calamity. The sea monster is one of my favorites, but they’re all awesome.
It was totally unexpected, the sudden urge to buy new dishes, but when I saw an ad for Calamityware in my Facebook feed, I fell in love. I also didn’t expect my husband to like them, but he did. Faced with the prospect of having to entertain the whole family next Thanksgiving, splurging on dishes seemed like a perfectly reasonable idea to us. So we bought ourselves a set of Calamityware. And when you have nice dishes, you need other nice things to go with them, so . . .
Fancy New Stuff
Now we have these fancy blue goblets, crystal water glasses, and shiny new flatware. The table runner and place mats will likely be blue, too. And since it’s time to repaint and redecorate the dining room, we’ll probably add some blue elements to match the dishes (curtains and and chair cushions, perhaps). The blue just keeps on creeping.
I have a cold, and I’m tired and unfocused, but I have things I need to do. Why do we have to have colds? Why do we have to have things to do? Why can’t we always be well and have everything be easy? Oh, I know that’s just life and “get over it” and blah blah blah, but let me just say that if I had been in charge of creating the world, it would have been a kinder, easier place to live, and a lot more fun.
If it’s true that we are what we eat, then Livia is 25% bread, 25% peanut butter, and 50% sugar.
P.S. My husband says these percentages are inaccurate and Livia is actually at least 60% sugar, and the remaining 40% is a mix of bread, peanut butter, milk, hot dog, and pepperoni pizza.
P.P.S. Lest it appear that I’m picking on Livia, I should add that my hubby is 50% guacamole, I’m 50% potato chips, and Marshall is 50% pizza.
On Thursday afternoon we picked the kids up from school and drove up to Great Wolf Lodge for some water park fun in celebration of Livia’s birthday. We stayed overnight and all day Friday (yes, we kept the kids out of school–tsk, tsk!). I am glad to be home again, where it’s quiet and easier to sleep, but I also miss the park. There the pool area is warm (there’s even a hot tub), and we spent a lot of time together as a family. Here it is chilly, and we’re all on our individual computers, separated. I think I will have to plan another family trip soon.
Making the bed is a repetitive chore, so to help stave off boredom, I arrange things a little differently each time (it’s amazing how many variations are possible given seven pillows and a stuffed hedgehog!). This picture shows how the bed looked yesterday. Usually the shams on the two biggest pillows match the light blue comforters, but I thought it would be nice for a change to use the shams that match the dark blue coverlet. I keep the coverlet on the bed simply because I couldn’t resist buying it, so I have to use it somehow. It’s super soft and nice to lie down on for quick naps. All those things can’t stay on the bed all night, though, so every night before sleep, I fold the coverlet in half, roll it up, and put it on the chest at the foot of the bed. Then I pile the pillows up on the ottoman. This nighttime ritual can be annoying on those occasional nights when I’m exhausted and want to go to sleep immediately, but most nights it’s soothing, as most rituals are, which is why we bother having them.Here is the same scene from a different angle to show that the bookcase headboard isn’t as dinky as it looks in the other picture. But where, you may ask, are all the books? If you’re going to have a bookcase headboard, shouldn’t there be more books? You’d think so, but it turns out that I like having just that one stack of unread books. It’s easy to dust around and small enough that it feels like it will be a simple task to read them all. But, to be honest, I always read the book that’s on top, and when I’m done with it I put a new book on top. So I’m not not sure when I’ll get to the rest of the stack, but whatever. 🙂Here is a close-up of Tiggy, the Three-Legged Hedgehog. She is the softest stuffed animal in the universe. Someday I will sew her missing leg back on. In the meantime, she seems content to act as a decorative pillow with character. The star pillow is from Target. I purchased it for $5 on a whim. I had only planned to use it for the Christmas season, but I’ve since decided to keep it permanently, because it matches the twilight mood of the room.
Yesterday I had my annual work review. My boss told me she’s happy with my work, as always. She told me that she wanted to give me a bigger raise, but she was constrained by the numbers set by the higher-ups, as always. Afterward, I checked my first paycheck of the year to make sure the raise had been factored in, and to see how much more I was getting per paycheck, only to find that almost all of my raise had been eaten up by taxes and insurance, as always. And what little more I was getting wouldn’t even come close to paying for the increases in our cost of living, as always. And so, though I am now bringing home a salary that once would have thrilled me, it feels like less than I was making before. As always.
I began this year of reading with Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz. I gave it an A+ grade, because I thoroughly enjoyed this mystery within a mystery. The book begins with the frame story, giving us a glimpse of an editor who is about to delve into her bestselling mystery author’s latest work.
A bottle of wine. A family-sized packet of Nacho Cheese Flavoured Tortilla Chips and a jar of hot salsa dip. A packet of cigarettes on the side (I know, I know). The rain hammering against the windows. And a book. What could have been lovelier?
But the introduction takes a dark turn, because this protagonist already knows how her life has turned out.
I had no idea of the journey I was about to begin and, quite frankly, I wish I’d never allowed myself to get pulled on board. It was all down to that bastard Alan Conway.
Alan Conway is the fictional author whose book she (and we) are about to read, and of course, there will be many surprises along the way. I can’t say more without spoiling the plot. I recommend this book for readers who love mysteries, and particularly for fans of Agatha Christie, whose work is referenced often. I also recommend it for lovers of language and wordplay, the kind of readers who would admire this self-justifying run-on sentence:
You read and you read and you feel the pages slipping through your fingers until suddenly there are fewer in your right hand than there are in your left and you want to slow down but you still hurtle on towards a conclusion you can hardly bear to discover.
I will put Magpie Murders on the shelf with my collection of Agatha Christie novels. I feel even more nostalgic for Hercule Poirot after having read it, and I suspect I will be meeting again with him soon. In a world gone crazy, I need my favorite lovable, logical, and predictable fictional characters even more than usual, and Poirot is standing first in line to cheer me up.
I might be a lot older and a little wiser and responsible for two children, but that doesn’t make getting out of bed in the morning any easier now than it was for me as a teenager. This week was brutal. If my alarm clock weren’t somehow 12 minutes fast (!!!), the kids would have missed the bus every day.
