A Long List of Ideas

I don't design a lot yet, but I have a ton of ideas for stuff to make once I do.  Here's a list of some of my ideas that I hope to stitch up someday, in no particular order.

• "Anything is Possible" with a Kevin Garnett Celtics jersey.  Or make it big and put Kevin Garnett on a boat.
• "You are the best worst person I know" from the show The League
• The ice cream quote from Phantam, along with some reference to Reggie Bannister
• Also, possibly, the random guitar duet from Phantasm
• More Home Movies stitches
• Katamari stitches
• Mission Hill stitches
• Salad Fingers stitches
• "Juicy Chunks, yeh" from MacCurdie's Exhibition in Scotland.  I started to design this at one point but put it off for now
• "Stay far from timid, only make moves when your hearts in it, and live the phrase sky's the limit." - Biggie Smalls
• "Busy gettin' brain like Krang." - Chilidish Gambino/Ninja Turtles mashup
• "You's a Ho" - Ludacris
• "drank" - Kendrick Lamar
• "I'm doing 100 on the highway, so if you do the speed limit get the fuck outta my way" - Ludacris
• "Cornbread, ain't nothin' wrong with that" - Chris Rock (This one is in the works right now)
• "Say what you will about pacifism, but at least it's an ethos" - Big Lebowsi/LOTR mashup with an Ent pictured
• "Sharing, it's a rule now" - IASIP/Home Movies mashup with a picture of Walter and Perry
• "It's raw!" - IASIP/Gordon Ramsay mashup with some milksteak boiled over hard
• "Wow!" - Doge/Owen Wilson mashup
• "You got to be a spirit.  You can't be no ghost." from Bulworth
• Charles Swindoll's quote on Attitude
• "Losers make excuses, winners make it happen" - Bubba Sparxxx
• "Reach for your dreams" with gymnast Mr. Poopy Butthole
• "My attitude is celibate; I don't give a fuck." - Fabulous
• "Killin someone's vibe should be a fuckin crime." - Rae Sremmurd
• "One good thing about music, when it hits you feel no pain." - Bob Marley
• "Not my chair not my problem." - Or really almost any quote from Liam Lynch and Dan Deacon's "Drinkin' Outta Cups"
• "Get snagged bitchass"
• "The pink fuck who loves to suck." - Quote about Kirby from Nick Wiger of the Get Played podcast
• "Damn girl, you shit with that ass?" - Gail from Letterkenny as a bathroom wall piece

Finished Stitch #3: "Ludacris/Dora the Explorer" Stitch

I LOVE rap music.  I'd love to make hip hop based stitches like Wu Stitch some day, though obviously I'm coming along in the designing department.

Recently I decided to try my best at a first hip hop stitch, and had a few choices.  One was a lyric from Kanye West's "Monster," with a bunch of pictures of monsters around the outside of the lyrics.  But that's a TON of images, so I decided to go with something more basic with Ludacris' "Number One Spot."

My lyric of choice was "Explorin' like Dora, these Swipers can't swipe me."  It encapsulates a random TV show I watched a bit as a youth with a great rappers song, and I always really liked the lyric, so I figured it was worth doing.  So ONTO THE blue pen it was!

This one was tricky...my first two things were just images, and this one had words.  So I traced Dora's head in the top left, Swiper in the bottom right, and lyrics in the middle-ish.  After a week, it looked like this:

My wife's store has a monthly sip n' stitch, and I mostly worked on this there.  But I was working on other stuff for a bit.  Finally, like two months ago, I started marking some headway.  First I finished the top:

I thought Dora looked really good, though I wish I had done another outline of her face.  The writing...meh.  I should've made it more script based, but I kind of just winged it.  And it looks kinda weird.

Here's the bottom and Swiper:

The words suffer from the same ails of the above image, but I think Swiper looks pretty great!  Aside from his not being finished-ness and one eye.  In terms of not being finished, when I traced the image I tried to make it so it'd stop at the edge of the hoop.  But when I stitched it all, that didn't really work.  So I wish I had finished him rather than having some incomplete pieces.

As for the eye, I had a lot of knots, so my back was a mess!  See below:

That being said in the end it wasn't all bad.  The text is definitely a little off, and there's a lot of white space, but I think Luda would be proud:

This is the biggest piece I've done to date, and it makes me either want to follow stricter patterns for embroidery or switch to cross stitch for a bit.  I guess we'll see what's next!

Finished Piece #2: Tubbs from Neko Atsume

In late February, I attended Midwest Craft Con in Columbus, Ohio with my wife.  She was a sponsor so she got a free ticket (which went to me) and I was able to attend any events/classes/etc. I wanted.  Mostly I was there to sell stuff for my wife as she attended classes, but I did have the option to attend classes if I wanted.  That being said, I didn't go to any classes - nothing really stood out to me as something good for me - but man did I ever event it up!

I helped people make some shrinky dink vaginas.  I made friends with friendship bracelets and wine. I sang some karaoke (pictured is "Come to my Window" by Melissa Etheridge).  And somehow, within all of that, I found time to stitch!

We had a friend who introduced us to Neko Atsume like two weeks before the Craft Con, and so by the time Con hit we were pretty into it all.  We mentioned it to everyone and anyone we could find, and got like ten people to add the app to their phone.  And then I decided to embroider Tubbs for funzies.

We had my trusty blue pen, so I traced an image of him sitting in front of an empty plate of sashimi onto some cloth.  The cool thing was I literally traded it off of my phone screen - I dropped my phone into the toilet a few weeks prior, and my new fancy phone was big enough to have the perfect image size for a tiny hoop stitch.  Then I stitched away, and the final result was this:

I'm super happy with it.  His right leg and crotch are a little weird, but I like how the crumbs turned out and I'm a huge fan of his general shape.  And the back isn't even that bad!

All in all, pretty awesome, and right now it's hanging in the front window of my wife's store.  It was on a back wall, but I figured that wasn't awesome enough for Tubbs, since he's such a beast.  I think this is the best stitch I've done to date - hopefully my skills continue to improve!

My Only Finished Stitch to Date - Embroidered Coach McGuirk (and the beauty of the blue pen!)

Now, I begin this blog without having finished a lot of pieces.  I've stitched a few pieces of my wife's (she's The Hoop and Needle/Purple Hippo Stitches, a Cincinnati based brick and mortar cross stitch and embroidery shop) for her to sell at shows, and I've finished a few little samples as I taught various children/adults the basics of cross stitch and embroidery.  I also have a few works in progress (WIP). 

But as of the creation of this blog, I have done my own cross stitch or embroidery intended for myself or as a gift for another on ONE occasion.  Obviously I'm hoping to up that number as this blog continues, but this post is about my one finished piece, which features H. Jon Benjamin (who you may better know as Archer or Bob on Bob's Burgers) in his best all time role:

I always suggested cool stitches to my wife, but she always had so many other things to do and suggested I try doing it myself.  Originally I only knew Cross stitch, and the idea of making my own pattern on graph paper or in Mac Stitch frankly terrified me.  But then I learned Embroidery, and it all became possible - thanks to the power of the Blue pen.

Now for those of you that have never seen one of these - it is amazing.  You just draw whatever you want to stitch onto the linen you're using, and then stitch over it.  At the end, wash your fabric in water (hot or cold, doesn't matter), and the blue pen goes away.

Yeah, it's incredible.

So I found a nice picture of Coach McGuirk to shoot for and printed it out - ended up using this one:

Traced it with my trusty blue pen, and then stitched over the blue pen using the above image for a guess on colors.  Though, to be fair, I had my wife's floss wall at her store to help me pick colors.  It's every color of DMC floss all in one place.  Here's a bad picture of it from when we moved to our bigger and better location:

After all that tracing and color matching, I stitched and ended up with this:

It's mostly backstitch, with a little bit of satin stitch on the soccer ball.  My wife has tried to get me to use some other stitches - and some day I will - but on my first piece I was happy with this.  The colors seem right, and I like what I ended up with.  So all's well that ends well!

Welcome to the blog!

I've blogged a lot in my lifetime.

High School was all about life and drama.

College and early adult life was all about sports and baseball cards.

I'm still blogging about many of those things now, but I recently decided it was time to add something new to the mix - Stitching.

I'm not the first person to blog about stitching.  I'm not even close to the first man to blog about stitching (My focus will be mainly on Crossstitch and Embroidery).  But I think I'll bring my only little something to the world that hopefully makes this blog worth it!

I'm hoping to have lots of WIP posted, as well as sharing some sites I like along with possibly reviews of things I've messed with or seen.  If all goes well, this will be an interesting blog.  But only time will tell!