Thinking Outside the Hoop

Starfish pattern from Issue 242 Cross Stitcher magazine
Colors used were DMC 550, 552, and DMC Pearlescent Effects E211

It's a paperweight! Or, it could simply be a pretty piece of art for a shelf. Either way, it's a different way to display your embroidery. Tying a small bit of stitched fabric onto a rock like this is actually something I've done before in an embroidery course I took many years ago. I can't for the life of me remember if it was my idea or someone else's though. Nothing came up in a Google search either.

The original starfish pattern used shades of coral, but I chose to make mine purple like the ones found around here. I also used one strand of metallic thread mixed with my three strands of regular cotton to give it a bit of a wet looking shine. This also had a added bonus of giving it more dimension and making it look "bumpier" like a real starfish. I had originally intended to trim the thread that I used to tie it onto the rock, but I liked the look of the long ends.

Starfish pattern from Issue 242 Cross Stitcher magazine
Colors used were DMC 550, 552, and DMC Pearlescent Effects E211

Have you ever experimented with different ways to use or display your crafts?

Cats are totally the drag queens of the animal kingdom

Damn near lol'd myself right off the chair when I read this!

photo from I Can Has Cheeseburger, illustration by Teresa Burns Parkhurst

Pop Tarts and Lovecraft and cross stitch! Oh my!

Eating before bed gives me nightmares. Eating a lot before bed gives me a lot of nightmares, and I found that out the hard way earlier this week. I was feeling snackish one night, so I ate two chocolate Pop Tarts. Then an entire bag of popcorn smothered in melted butter and salt & vinegar spice. And then four more chocolate Pop Tarts. (Yup, you added that up right. Six chocolate Pop Tarts.) It all definitely falls into the it-seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time category. So, of course, I had oodles of weird nightmares and woke up a bunch of times throughout the night. Also, it probably didn't help that I read a few stories by H. P. Lovecraft before I went to sleep. I'm reasonably sure that Cthulhu didn't actually make an appearance though. Of course, that would have been down right cheery compared to some of the creepy silliness that my brain came up with.

And how awesome is this cross stitched sampler anyway?

Cthulhu cross stitch sampler by Disobedient Child

Rock n' Roll Falcon

Rock out with your crop out!

Remember those awesomely silly Dairy Queen commercials from last year? I loved them so much I wanted to immortalize them in stitches. Ok, so I haven't done any actual embroidering yet, but I still want to. I'm just getting around to cleaning up the doodles now. Oh well, better late than never...right? Does anyone even remember those commercials any more?

Anyway, feel free to embroider along with me! You can even add in an arm so the glove doesn't look like it's levitating, lol! Just make sure that what you do is for your own personal use, and that you don't sell the pattern or anything made from the pattern, please and thank you. Link backs are greatly appreciated as well!

Tales from the Draft Side: Part 3*

* Resolution #1 for 2012: catch up on all the stuff I've been procrastinating.

Here's another half finished thought from my draft folder. I'm sure there's an essay in there somewhere...

Zombies vs. Mummies

Hey, can mummies be considered zombies? There are definitely similarities. They're both animated corpses who are generally (and literally) dead set on destroying humans. Then again, mummies don't eat people, and even if they did, their bite wouldn't turn someone into a mummy. They also don't have any brains left in their heads, which of course renders head shots absolutely useless. They don't even need to wear helmets! See what I did there? So mummies aren't zombies, just boring ol' reanimated corpses.