Friday, September 11, 2009

Visions

Lately my brain has been swirling with ideas for projects. The one hold back is that I am not in any way, shape or form a designer. I hate sitting down and trying to figure out what goes where, how to make a curve without the need for fractional stitches. I have Patternmaker for Cross-Stitch and I'm apparently too stupid to work it or rather make it work for me. My respect for designers has jumped by leaps and bounds and leaps and bounds over the past week.

What I am I trying to design? Well I'm trying to design a sampler based on one of my favorite decades. I'm also going to try to hand-dye my own floss for it too. I'm a masochistic like that ya know. I mean if you've read this blog for any length of time, my constant attempts to sew are a perfect example of my love of pain-mental and physical. The physical pain comes from all the crawling around picking up shards of glass after I have thrown a glass of iced tea across the room because a straight line does not exist in my universe. Apparently on the planet I'm from, everything leans.

Another sampler I'm trying to design is one based on a family ghost story. My mamaw used to tell it and promise that every word was true. I've been trying to write a condensed version of the story in poem form. Uh Pablo Neruda and Elizabeth Barrett Browning are spinning in their graves begging the powers that be to make the girl just stop with the hideous example of poetry she has been putting forth in the universe because my attempts have set poetry back a 1,000 years.

And I've also been plotting out my 21st Century Sampler but that's on hold at the moment.

Getting back to the kind of stitcher I really am, here is my current progress on Primitive Needle's Simply Live:




How cute is this:




And for more Primitive Needle, here's the current WIP of Ichabod Seabury:


And a close up of the colors and how the words pop:






I took the pictures outside but it was cloudy. What's really bad is that my pictures on sunny days are just as bad as these.

7 comments:

Chocolates4Breakfast (Terri ~ Boog) said...

Oh, Melissa. You're way too hard on yourself! I'm sure you'll get the software all figured out! your WIPs look great!

Margaret said...

I agree with Terri (or as my daughter would say, what she said.) Your WIPs are great -- I just love Ichabod!

Mel said...

Those pics are just fine! And I do hope you work out the software. it will be all good.
Great WIP pics! :)

Deb said...

Your WIPs look great. And you know that if you have those ideas, they will eventually come out. Don't hard on yourself. Software can be a real pain to learn sometimes, but you know, one day the mind will click and you'll be designing up a storm. And we'll all be stitching it!!

Siobhán said...

Your PNs look great, Melissa! I really need to get Simply Live stitched.

Good luck with the software. Truly, I would have no idea where to begin. The stitching world is safe from any stick figures I might design. LOL Keep at it, I'm sure you'll get it all sorted!

Annemarie said...

Oh, I love your current WIPs and I feel your pain where designing your own stuff is concerned. Anything I've designed so far (which is *very* little) went straight from my brain on to linen...

Michelle said...

I LOVE your Ichabod Seabury - that is awesome on that fabric!!! I want, I want, I want!!