I just yesterday got around to picking up the latest Tin House, in preparation for a trip next week to Oklahoma.
At first I thought the cover looked really blurry, then I realized it was cross-stitched!
I’ll admit that I originally started reading Tin House because of a neat cover. Waiting until the plane ride to see how the fiction, essays, etc. on the inside are.
About a month ago John and I decided that it was a puzzle kind of Sunday, so we trekked out to FAO Schwarz and got the most fun-looking jigsaw puzzle they had to offer. They didn’t have a very wide selection.
The castle ended up giving us hours of entertainment—hours and hours more than we were expecting, and at some point it seemed more like work than entertainment. (The myriad foliage was way harder than the plain blue sky.)
Finally we finished it. We don’t have the wall space for a framed generic-looking puzzle, so our accomplishment sat in the middle of our living room floor for a week or so. Then we had guests coming over, but instead of taking it apart and shelving it, we did the obvious thing and carefully pushed the whole thing up against a wall in our bedroom.
That was weeks ago, and I finally gave it a good stepping on last night by accident.
As cool as this looks, it’s now time to put the puzzle away.
Some ideas just won’t leave you alone until you’ve found a way to make them work. I’ve tried making a knitted eighth note before, but didn’t like the results, so recently I tried making a mini sixteenth-note version with sock yarn.
I actually think they’re pretty cute, but the pattern isn’t very much fun, since you have to knit the two notes separately and join them with two I-cords, which are a pain to sew onto both notes. (I also tried picking up the stitches for one side, but that was even less fun than seaming.)
Maybe returning to worsted-weight yarn will help make this a better knit, so I’ll probably give that another try someday. But for now, I want to move on to something else!
It’s finally done!
I hope it’s obvious that the stuff at bottom are two tangled balls of yarn? That’s the only thing I am a little unsure of.
I’ve never designed a cross-stitch pattern before, but I’m planning to create the printable pattern, probably using Illustrator. Any preference between a chart with squares filled in with colors or a chart with symbols in lieu of colors?
I started taking a class in Illustrator a few weeks back, just because it was something I had wanted to learn for a while, especially after getting to know designers and professional illustrators who use it all the time.
I’m slowly grasping how it works and how to use some of the tools, and for practice the other night, I made these Boos!
The wings maybe could use a little work, but I’m happy with it as a beginner’s Illustrator illustration.
I don’t know if I would want to use Illustrator as a way to sketch out ideas from scratch, but it’s certainly a lot of fun to play around with manipulating basic shapes.
A new favorite!
I’d stayed away from The Fiery Furnaces because of the mixed reviews and “challenging” label that people tend to give them. But my music taste seems to have been veering a little to the strange side lately, so I thought I’d give Bluebuerry Boat, their 2004 rock opera, a try. On first listen, the theatricality wore me out a little, but before long, I had completely gotten on the boat. I bought the album two days ago, and I have listened to nothing else since. I kind of can’t stop.
Five of the 13 tracks are over seven minutes long, but among those are some of my favorites, composed of mini songs—some jazzy, some classic rock—mixed with sung dialog. Unusual rhymes and nonsense phrases abound; Lewis Carroll would probably approve. The album as a whole doesn’t have a story per se, but it’s about a lot of things, including seafaring, teleconferencing, and fratricide. But ultimately, it’s about the most fun with music and words that I’ve experienced in a long time.
Not for everyone, but probably for more people than it gets credit for.
John got these motorized Pac-Man toys at the recent New York Comic-Con. We only had enough batteries for one of them, though.
See who wins!
He also got me this awesome Zelda t-shirt. Everything about it is perfect, so it’s my new favorite.
To fly above the stitched Stackable Cats, of course!
I’m almost done with the whole cross-stitch, so I’ll share the final result soon.