incidents and accidents, hints and allegations

Romancing the Runoff is currently running an amazing auction to help support the Georgia Senate Runoffs via donations to Fair Fight, the New Georgia Project, and Black Voters Matter.

I intended to donate two stitched pieces to the auction, but I was too late. Here's what I'm going to do instead:

• If you're interested in either this 5x5" gold and dark red square, or this 5x5" blue gray and purple square, go donate to Romancing the Runoff in whatever amount you see fit. Those outside the United States can donate, there's a specific link for you, and I will ship anywhere.

• Comment here to say that you donated and which piece you're interested in. You do not need to tell me how much you donated, share a receipt, etc.; any donation suffices to get your name in the hat. (If you're interested in both, don't donate twice because that'll slightly increase the processing fees, just say so in your comment.)

  • If you're not a DW user, your comment will be screened so that you can leave me your email address.

• Comment by November 24 at 9:00 p.m. Eastern, same as the auction.

• I will pick the winners using a random number generator, as I usually do. (I will, at this point, ask the winners to share a copy of their donation receipt with me.)

Let me know if I've overlooked any contingency, and thanks!

First, another completed project, an all-blackwork square. If you can't see the image, open this link in an incognito window; I should really go back to self-hosting images but for now, convenience will win out, my apologies.

This is another pattern from Seba Designs, but I think I must've gotten it as a freebie or something way, way back in the day, because it's not available in the FB group's files. I messaged the designer to ask if she wanted me to upload it, and haven't heard back; I'll ask again when I post there.

I stitched this on white 18-count Aida with one strand of Caron Waterlilies 110 (Hyacinth). I went down to 18-count because a single strand didn't show up the way I wanted on lower counts, and because if I used more than one strand, I would've felt obligated to keep them parallel, which would have kept this from being an easy and fun project. I've never done blackwork with such an emphatically variegated thread before, and it was fun planning how to divide up sections. I don't quite love the design of the outermost section, but on the whole this was very satisfying.

(Also satisfying: most of the way through, I remembered that I had a scroll frame shoved in the back of a closet. I took that out, popped a clamp on the bottom, and just rested my Q-snaps across the scroll bars, with the clamp as an extremely low-rent version of the pegs on this stand that's no longer being made. Stitching two-handed, with my dominant hand underneath and other hand on top, is so fast.)

I actually finished this on Monday. I know exactly what fun project I'm doing next, but I was very good and did not start it, which worked out well because later that day I ended up spending a few hours mending a quilt that was made for Chad when he was a baby; it has various cut-out shapes hand-sewn to the front, and unsurprisingly, over the last decade of heavy use on the couch by our kids, those shapes have started coming loose. While sewing that, I found myself pondering how nice it is to have something that was made so long ago, and I have a sewing machine now, what if I started making quilts that might be family heirlooms in the fullness of time…

…and then I remembered that the day before, when I had been hemming fabric with my brand-new sewing machine to turn into masks, I had said to myself, "I know this would go a lot better if I ironed the creases the way all the instructions say to. But: I don't wanna." And so I didn't. (It turned out fine. It would have been better if I'd pressed it, of course, but still: fine.) So quilts, which appear to be all about precision, are not for me.

(Plus I've missed my window to create heirloom blankets for this generation, really.)

Anyway. More mending of the quilt, once I further tweak my homemade duct-tape-and-dime thimble; more making very simple masks on the sewing machine. And then: more blackwork.

Are you crafting at the moment? Anything you're eyeing once you can get the materials/energy/time? Feelings about needlework stands (I have many, which I omitted from the post for the sake of time)?

I spotted DMC's new-ish sparkly floss, Mouliné Étoile, in a store back in the fall and wanted to try it out, so decided I would make SteelyKid a Pride keychain for Christmas, because they had the necessary colors in-stock.

I finished it yesterday, so not timely at all, alas, but SteelyKid still liked it.

( the usual attempt to embed from Google Photos )

If the above embed doesn't work, the image—and a short video—are down at the bottom of the stitching album.

So how was the Étoile to work with? Fine. I reflexively used the loop start initially, and it doesn't like being folded in half like that, the sparkly bit and the cotton bit separate and bunch up. Otherwise, it didn't need particularly special handling.

Those colors were C550, C666, C699, C725, C816, and C995, just because they were what was in-stock, on 16-count Aida for a 2x3" photo keychain, finished with a row of nun's stitch in white. I had a little trouble fitting the finished stitch into the keychain, and I am steadfastly refusing to check whether I failed to account for the border edge in my calculations, because that would be just embarrassing. (Alternatives: the fabric size was very slightly off, or it got stretched a bit in the stitching.)

So that's done, three months plus late, and now I can start on the daily temperature chart for 2020 that seemed like a good idea for some reason . . .

I've been working on this embroidered floral heart for almost two years, which seems unlikely, on one hand, because it does go very fast, and perfectly realistic, on the other, since I went very long stretches without picking it up. But I finished it a few weeks ago, damp-blocked it on our ironing board, and put it in a cheap Target frame. (I used spray adhesive, because the fabric was smaller than the backing board and I figured that would make lacing it in place annoying. This worked fine, but I can definitely see that lacing would be just that bit better.)

Anyway, full photos over at the Google Photos album; I shall attempt to embed a close-up of the finished version behind the cut:

( picture of embroidery )

This was a decent first project, which only used five stitches: stem stitch, backstitch, straight stitch, French knots, and detached chain stitch. For all that French knots get a bad reputation, I have to say that I had the most difficulty with the detached chain stitch, which surprised me. Also, the straight stitch kind of stressed me out, because I had trouble getting the spacing (a) visually the way I wanted it and (b) fairly consistent in neighboring areas. But it is nice not having to look so much at a pattern and having variety, compared to cross-stitching.

The printed fabric was from Fileuse d'Etoiles on Etsy; the pattern is currently only available as a PDF. Unfortunately I did not love the pattern, which used color-coding in a way that I found hard to parse. (I also made a few different colors choices deliberately.) I just started this very easy Christmas tree kit and am contemplating switching up some of the backstitch for stem stitch, maybe for the green "trunk" parts; I'm concerned it might get crowded, though, so we'll see. It'll be a good travel project, anyway. After that I have this fun squirrel that was a surprise gift, and then we'll see; it might be time to try crewel, because I've been eyeing this shop's kits for ages.

Gosh, cross-stitching little things is addictive. They finish so fast!

I made this Rainbow Pride Planet as a pin. The model is on black fabric but I hate stitching on black and only the edge was going to show, so I went with white. Stitched on 18 count to fit the largest cover buttons I could find—which I recommend, they were super easy to put together, and then I just used Krazy Glue to attach a bar pin. Mostly stitching on 18 count was a relief after the 22 count of the Captain Marvel keychain, but I am super tired of stitching on Aida; 18 count is probably big enough that I could have used the sewing method, but the fabric was just so stiff. (Also occasionally the stitches would get a little crowded, which is visible to the extreme perfectionist such as myself.)

Picture at Google Photos in case the below embed stops working:

I have the materials to make another one of these, does anyone want one in due course?

Last night I hand-rolled a Google spreadsheet to track my embroidery floss, including columns for floss assigned to specific projects and an auto-generated to-buy column. Then I went through all my supplies, entering floss and tidying up my patterns and so forth, and it was extremely satisfying. Also, I am not allowed to buy any new projects, except for the one I bought yesterday that was the final straw prompting this reorganization.

Of course I finished that slightly late, and then the Pip needed me for an hour in the middle of the night, which hasn't happened in ages, so sleep deficit, back again so soon.

Today SteelyKid declared a desire to learn D&D, which made me think ruefully of my statement, less than a week ago, that I could never do tabletop roleplaying! Anyway we bought a starter kit today and Chad was the DM, since he played some in the past. The level we're playing on is not very taxing, of course, and we made it through one combat session and it was fun, the kids were really creative and into it. But it was very time-consuming, and softball and baseball start this week, so I'm not sure how much we'll pursue it in the near future.

Links:

• It appears that muting various Twitter meta-keywords will keep stuff off your timeline that isn't, you know, tweets from people you follow. (You may need to clear cache to see the effects.)

  Since the link is an image, go to Twitter's muted keywords settings and add these:

  • suggest_ranked_timeline_tweet
  • suggest_pyle_tweet
  • suggest_activity_tweet
  • suggest_recycled_tweet
  • suggest_recycled_tweet_inline
  • suggest_recap
  • suggest_who_to_follow

  For desktop, this is an improvement over my prior method of using CSS to hide things—plus AdBlock, you still need an ad blocker—because it follows you wherever. For Android, I'm sticking with a third-party client (Twidere), because it doesn't include Twitter's ads and I don't have to keep telling it which order to read things in. (You could also run a Twitter instance in Hermit, which has a native adblocker.)

• Please enjoy this story seed: "The ultimate power move in a vampire/fairy rivalry would be the fairy inviting the vampire over for tea."

• The subreddit for The Magicians is r/brakebills, and an innocent person mistakenly posted about . . . the bill for their brake pads, which ended up being a much-needed bit of levity for the fandom post-season finale, as mistaken person was very sweet and gracious about it.

( Avengers: Endgame spoiler fics, extremely minimal descriptions )