happy halloween

My friend Amy, the cross stitch guru who you may remember from such awesomeness as the alphabet wall hanging, made this for me. I love it so much. It's a scene from my favourite episode of Buffy, Hush. A group of demons come to town with a plan to steal people's hearts, but first they have stolen everyone's voices, so this is a diagram drawn by one of the characters(Giles) on an overhead projector to try and explain the situation. I'm going to get it framed and put it up somewhere to scare visitors. Thanks, Amy!

Thanks also to Cara who lent me the cross stitch pattern originally. I am mostly pleased by the fact that a pattern exists for something like this. It's clearly not all about vases of flowers and terriers in the cross-stitch world these days. Which can only be good news.
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alphabet wall hanging

Wowsers. My crafty dabblings have been recently put to shame by this gobsmackingly gorgeous cross-stitch wallhanging that my friend Amy has just presented me with. It's all done using teeny-tiny thread for incredibly detailed pictures. Thought you crafty blog readers might enjoy its handmade marvellousness!








It's a present for rubbishknitterjunior for his room, I am going to get it framed. I expect him to be fully literate by about one year old after gazing slack jawed at the loveliness of this thing. I can't decide which is my favourite letter - they are all so amazingly intricately detailed, I don't see how Amy has managed to do this and maintain a job and active social life this winter.

It's just totally awesome to receive any kind of handmade gift, but to receive one that clearly has had so much time lavished on it really does make me feel very honoured and quite emotional. And very inspired, and somewhat vindicated for spending so much time making things, when such heights of beautiful thing-making can be aspired to.

The only problem I have now is - what am I going to make for her in return? The crafty bar has been raised to a sillily high level by this gift, and she is off on a round-the-world trip in a month's time... yikes!

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valentines card chart / surprise yarn

Ok, so I finally got round to putting up the chart for the Valentines day card I made. Possibly a little late if anyone else wants to use it! Oops. Well, er... there's always next year! Or perhaps sooner, if you love someone enough to express it in a highly labour-intensive way at a non Hallmark-sanctioned time of year.

In other news I got some lovely surprise yarn from a mate who just got back from a trip round South America. What an ace unexpected present - look at that soft alpaca-y goodness! I'm pondering what to make out of it... it's very soft and loosely plied, so i'm thinking maybe a scarf would be quite nice, if i can rocket-propel my needles and get one made before springtime...

It's really nice yarn to feel... i just wound it into a ball with minimal hand chafing. (Actually less of a ball, more of an oblate spheroid, pleasingly like the shape of the earth, with my half-arsed back of chair ball-winding technique).




Close up of glossy camelid-sourced goodness.

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no gorillas allowed

*sings*

love is in the air... everywhere i look around...

This is my valentines day effort, just finished. I think I'm fairly safe to post it here as I doubt the intended recipient will be perusing the knitting blogosphere any time soon. It's based on the end of level scene in Donkey Kong - when Mario climbs up onto the top girder you get this tender little moment. Purists will note that the Lady isn't wearing high heels in my version - I wanted the figures to be roughly the same size, and I'm more of a trainers girl myself.

I'm no cross-stitch expert but it seemed the best way of compressing a small pixellated scene from the 8 bit era into a card-sized space, so this is the medium I have opted for.


It was inspired by recently watching King of Kong, a documentary about the mad competitiveness of people trying to get the high score in Donkey Kong. Really far, far better than it sounds... it made me go on a small retro games bender. Equally pleasing, and even funnier was the South Park pisstake of it, which was on last night as I was stitching the Lady's skirt. Best not to go into details of that one in case anyone is eating or drinking as they read this, but suffice it to say that it was utter genius, in a fairly stomach-churningly unpleasant sort of way.



The inside of the card. You probably have to have seen the end of level scene in Donkey Kong to fully appreciate this. If you haven't, I don't think it's too much of a spoiler to reveal that the the titular gorilla has something of an irritating habit of repeatedly spoiling Mario and the Lady's romantic liaisons.

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