Yes, yes. No posts for a while. This is because I’m in the process of buying a house. Do you have any idea how time consuming that is for a single bloke? On the plus side I’ve gone well beyond my original aim to just purchase a property this year and have extended it to learning all about rising damp. *sob*
In other news, I have been growing my hair in the hope that it will soon become sentient and can do my job. Or write blog posts. Either will do.
Well, I’m still not smoking and am working on the backlogs of tasks. Many of my targets are ongoing ones, but I have managed to learn one of my target of “5 new things”. Cross stitching. Yep, you heard me right, cross stitching. OK, so you may be asking a few questions. Why is probably quite high up the list. What may indeed help to explain why. How might appear if you’ve managed to get past why and what. Anyhow, I digress. Let me begin with …
To fully explain why I have been cross stitching I’m going to have to walk you through my thought process. I have a friend from university who I introduced to Buffy back in the day. She has since developed a full blown Whedon addiction. Her thirtieth is coming up and someone (not me) came up with the bright idea of making a quilt for her. Everyone was to contribute a patch. This prompted the following thoughts:
And so my cross stitching skills gain a +1.
As mentioned above, I ended up stitching a pixel art pattern. Etsy to the rescue with an awesome Pixel People pattern of the Buffy gang! There are a few different Whedon patterns on there – I’ve provided links below – and the Buffy one seemed like an achievable goal. This pattern is sold as a grid pattern to print along with a list of the coloured thread needed. The colours are listed for three different common manufacturers of thread so it’s not hard to find a source. I bought mine online from Sew and So along with needles and an embroidery hoop. I really can’t recommend the latter more. While it’s possible to do without, for a beginner it makes life a lot easier and allows you to stop at will with less chance of tangling things up.
The Patterns: Etsy Buffy Pattern Etsy Dr Horrible Pattern Etsy Firefly Pattern
And the work:
So, seems pretty cool huh? OK, not so much, but it could make a great gift for someone someday so maybe you want to give it a go. For my transformation from no-hoper to stitching hero I dug deep into the wonders of the internet for help. The video below is an excellent five minute introduction to all you need to know to start cross stitching. It’s worth paying attention to the bit on how to neaten up the back of your cross stitch as that pays off with the flatness of the finished product.
For the additional wording below the pattern I used StitchPoint’s cross stitch writing tool to compose the text and then copied this onto my Buffy character grid. Easy peasy lemon squeezy.