24....but 25 is What I'm Looking Forward To....

Twenty-four years ago we took the vows. Amazingly enough we are still married, still like each other, and absolutely still to this day do not have many things in common. Strange huh?


The spousal unit is a football fanatic. If we lived in Oakland, CA he would be a facepainter and at every Raiders home game. The fact that we can't afford to live in No Cal is probably what has helped this marriage survive 24 years because I'm a bit insane but I'm pretty sure I do not have the strength to live with a face painter, it's difficult enough to survive those 16 weeks of football season--because the Raiders are bad asses and all but they, well, they break his heart every single year. But the man is not a quitter. He's also a Cubs fan. Yeah, his extracurricular sports life is kind of sad, but again he's not a quitter. I know that it's his strength of character and loyalty that has gotten us through all these years, because look, I'm a Cub's fan too, our oldest son is named after Ryne Sandberg, but every year, baseball season starts, he's full of so much hope, I'm all, the Cubs, they just break your heart, but he has hope. And that is why we are still married. He is definitely a lemonade kind of guy and I'm so 100% the lemon girl.

He has stood by me in some of the darkest days of my life. He's never expected me to be anyone but exactly who I am and he's done everything in his power to help me make dreams come true. He's never once laughed at me when I've said I want to do this or that. He knew I always wanted to live near the beach so he applied for a job down here and now here we are. Everyday I count my blessings that he and I got married. I am so not worthy and yes, I know exactly how lucky I am.

Now our wedding was a nightmare for me. My mother fought me on every single thing I wanted and she won because I just didn't have it in me to fight with her. I wanted to get married at the Church on the River at sunset. No. Had to get married in our church. So ok I wanted to get married on Friday night, no--people work, people are coming from out of town it's inconsiderate to the people invited, well here's a secret, I didn't know half the people she invited to the wedding and didn't want them to come. Hateful, yep, but I didn't want 200 people at my wedding. Seriously, I wanted small, people I knew and that cared about me, not people invited because they were someone's cousin 20 times removed and blah, blah, blah, but I gave in on that. So then I said I want to have it Saturday morning and then have brunch, nope once again, and I believe her exact words were, "What kind of stupid idea is that." So we ended up getting married Saturday night and I was mad about it the whole time.

Another battle was my wedding dress. My mom had said they would buy my wedding dress, but she had kind of a limited price range(like in 1940s dollars). I was looking at tea length Gunne Sax dresses but I ran across the dress I eventually got on the clearance rack at JC Penney's. It was $400. My mom said no. My mamaw said, "This is the dress, if you don't buy it I will." I got the dress. Have I mentioned how much I love my mamaw?

Another major battle was the preacher. I wanted a certain preacher who had been over our church when I was younger. Momma put a stop those ideas because it would be insulting to the current reverend. That's all I'll say about that. I want to say more, I truly do, but I won't.

So--my wedding was not how I wanted it, I basically turned over creative control, and just showed up and I was not happy. I just wanted to get it over with and get to Pensacola Beach.







This is one of my favorite pictures because the wedding from hell was almost over. And it has chocolate cake! Did I mention that the caterers ran out of punch? We got married Southern Baptist style which means punch and cake in the Fellowship Hall. Yeah, boring. When I think back on September 14, 1985, all I remember is how tired I was and so ready for it to be done. I was so crazy by the time the actual wedding rolled around I just wanted to get it over with. How much does that suck?

But for all the things that didn't go my way that day 24 years ago, I do know that I married the exact right person, you know peas and carrots, peanut butter and jelly? Yeah, we fit, we make it work, and he's still the first person I want to talk to when something happens.


Now I've mentioned my mamaw time and again on this blog and never posted a picture. This is my mamaw with me before I got married. It's also fitting that I post a picture because tomorrow would have been her 23rd wedding anniversary to her second husband. She asked me to be her maid of honor at her wedding. It's possible it would have been their 25th wedding anniversary but I think I got married first. The memories are kind of fuzzy at the moment.


Now why, you ask, am I looking forward to 25? We are seriously discussing our 25th wedding anniversary and renewing our vows at the Graceland Wedding Chapel(I'm thinking it might be a different chapel but I'm blanking at the moment) officiated by an Elvis impersonator in Vegas Baby! While getting married is a serious step, the wedding itself should be fun. The vow renewal in Vegas officiated by Elvis should appropriately offend my mother and be good payback for all the misery of 1985. We did discuss renewing our vows on the beach down here at a sunset ceremony but honestly, after living here all these years, a beach wedding has really lost it's mystique. I like the Elvis idea so much better.

I love you babe!

PS-I wanted to add that I didn't really intend for this to be a "bash my mother" post. I really was trying to say that even though my wedding was not, for me, the magical special experience every girl dreams of, as long as you marry the right person, all that other crap doesn't matter. At the time you think it does but when it comes down to it, all those things that seem so very important right that second, really don't matter a flip once it's all over.

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.

M-O-O-N

Spells Primitive Needle*:



This is the moon band of Ichabod Seabury. Fingernail Moon means I still got a whole lotta stitchin' to do!

Here's the big view, and yes the picture is crap but the project isn't. I love, love, love, the funky PTP Swamp linen. It's a great green. This is my first time using the Belle Soie threads, and my second time using silks, I am so a silk thread virgin. I like the Noir and the Lasagna, the blackish color and the hint of orange you see there to the left in the picture. The Tumbleweed has not been pleasant and I'm wishing I had swapped out a DMC or a WDW thread. I'm finding that the Tumbleweed frays and shreds pretty easily. It's possible it's an issue with me but I don't think so since the Noir and the Lasagna do not seem to have the same issues. I've started using shorter lengths. I only have two more lines of verse to go and bit around the top border and then I'm done with the Tumbleweed.

I'm hoping that designers don't start sending me cease and desist orders in regards to posting pictures of my WIP as they are so awful it might hurt their sales. I try, really I try hard to take good pictures but I just haven't found that sweet spot for the best light. One day I will.

*apologies to Stephen King

The real quote is "M-O-O-N spells Tom Cullen" or something like that from The Stand. My all time favorite Stephen King novel.

Oh and for all you Halloweenies--check out the new Stacy Nash book Merry Hallowe'en.

Not Enough Hours in the Day

Thanks everyone for the comments on Cape Cod Girls, aka Gulf Coast Girls. I'm always nervous to change up a design but this worked out better than I expected.

For some exciting news and you all probably know this already, I'm honored to be the guest blogger over at Anna's blog, Stitch Bitch. Thank you so much Anna for asking me to participate in your I Love This Project series. I wish we could have hooked up when I was in your part of the country a few weeks ago.

School started back down here on Monday and it's been a busy week. My 13 yr old did real well back out in the human world. He's spent most of the summer on XBOX Live, his headset and iPhone his means of communication and I was relieved that he didn't confuse any of his teachers with killer zombies. I'm thinking 8th grade is going to be a good year. He's regretting not signing up for football when he was in the throes of XBOX fever, and he may still be able to play, but I'm thinking he may have decided too late that real sports should trump the virtual world. A hard lesson for him and I think he'll make better choices next time.

Is it wrong of me to be glad I don't have to spend every afternoon at the practice field and every Saturday at football games? It wasn't awful last year but I was secretly relieved when he said none of his friends were playing this year and he was a little concerned he might be thrown in with the older boys because he's at that odd age, a little old to be a Mighty Mite but maybe just a pound over where he needs to be which would shove him in with 16 and 17 yr olds which is probably just a little bit terrifying. That's one of the reasons we didn't shove him out the door with cleats and pads in hand, we want him to enjoy playing and a 13 yr old that is only one pound heavier than he needs to be doesn't necessarily need to be on the field with kids that outweigh him fifty to a hundred pounds.

In stitching news I'm working on Primitive Needle's Icabod Seabury. Was going to post a progress pic but it's stormy down here and there's really not much to see but some wicked cool 36ct swamp fabric from PTP and a bit of the border stitched in Belle Soie Noir. This is my first experience using silk and it's kind of nice. I mean seriously, that thread just slips through the linen like butta!

That's all the news from here, hopefully some crafty pics tomorrow. I want to get back into a regular blogging routine.

What You Come Here For.....

The porn, the stitching porn that is.....I have brought a project to climax...uh, completion.....of course my photography is as bad as what you find on the porn channels that enjoy showing the homemade porno flicks, not that I'd know anything about that......

What you see below, well that's my finished Cape Cod Girls, only I don't know anything about being a Cape Cod Girl. I'm a Gulf Coast Girl....so.....

(click to enlarge)

Clothesline courtesy of Pam

I did a bit of rewriting and changed the verse to read Gulf Coast Girls instead of Cape Cod Girls...and then it dawned on me that a Gulf Coast Girl would not comb her hair with Codfish bones, but instead......


a little more rewording and our Gulf Coast Girl combs her hair with Grouper bones.

I stitched this using the recommended threads and 40ct PTP Highland(which I love). I did use DMC 224 for the Cape Cod Merchick's face and hands since I didn't have any WDW Peach.

Thanks Lisa for such a great design.

I want to thank everyone for offering up their thoughts on cross stitch and how much they love it or don't these days. I've enjoyed reading all your blogs and have some comments about other people's very thoughtful responses, school starts back Monday(the most wonderful time of the year) so maybe I'll be able to get a few complete thoughts together in the very near future.

WOW!

First of all I want to thank everyone for taking the time to answer my questions. I'm still reading blogs--fighting for the computer is getting old. I'm excited to see that most people register above a six on the cross stitch passion meter and that our love for our craft of choice is solid. I plan to answer my own questions in the next day or two but today I want to share a bit of embroidery I've been doing.

I have never been big on embroidery because one thing I love about cross stitch, I know exactly where to stick the needle, I know that if I come up in this hole and go down in that one(hmmm, sounds a bit like, ahem) my stitch will be perfect(we won't get into that whole railroading/laying tool thing right now) but embroidery, well, you have to pay attention. You have to kind of know what you're doing or your stitches will be all over the place, different sizes, not straight, etc. That doesn't stop me from trying though. One of my treasures is a shirt my Mamaw embroidered me when I was 12 or 14, I can't remember exactly but I still have it and can't let it go. She didn't embroider much, so it makes that shirt even more special.

I love the look of embroidered linens and I have a dresser scarf my great grandmother embroidered. My Mamaw always said Mrs. Gibson and I would have loved each other because that woman loved her some embroidery.

The other day I was browsing the feeling stitchy blog and ran across this:

katie.cupcake: embroidery--scroll down a little. Her embroidery inspired me to stitch this:


Yes my picture is craptastic, but you can click on it to enlarge it and maybe it will be better.

Here's the indoor shot. I know I need to read some book or something about product placement, lighting, aperture(is that the right word?). I was going for the "bored student doodling in class or maybe what Ally Sheedy(the Basketcase in The Breakfast Club might have doodled in detention)

The notebook paper--all I did was flip over a piece of regular old notebook paper and trace over it with a heat transfer pencil. The tattoo is a Jenny Hart design from her Stitch It Kit. I've had that forever and never make time to embroider but I'm always inspired to do some embroidery after I browse Florasita's blog, things I've made: Finished! This link doesn't take you to her main page but to a project she recently finished.

Another item I'd like to share with you all are these:

TIBETAN BUDDHA - Fancy Embroidery Cards - Floss Winders - PDF Download by peti

and

ART NOUVEAU - Stitch Happy - Fancy Embroidery Cards - Floss Winders - PDF Down

I first saw these on the feeling stitchy blog and decided to order them for myself.

Yes you have to print and cut them out yourself but it's pretty easy with a pair of detail scissors like for scrapbooking, Martha Stewart's are $10 at Walmart and I know there are cheaper ones you can find at AC Moore or JoAnn's.

I printed out my first sheet of each on 110 lb card stock. I'd like something a little sturdier so I'm going to see if I can track down some 140 lb cardstock. It seems to be hard to find, but these on the 110 cardstock don't seem to be any flimsier than the inexpensive bobbins you can buy and I've used those for years. These are pretty sweet and really glam up the boring old floss bobbin. But I do think sturdier cardstock would make them just about perfect.

Since I mentioned The Breakfast Club, I'd like to say R.I.P. John Hughes. What a genius. He really captured the feel of a generation with his movies. He gave us the Brat Pack. We quote from his movies all the time around here and my 13 yr old loves The Breakfast Club.

Nothing to See Here

As my camera is giving me fits. I wasn't going to blog until I had pictures because I've read over and over how people don't enjoy pictureless blogs, so if you want to stop reading now, that's ok. I understand, but let's face it, my pictures could never have been what drew you to this blog, not by any stretch of the imagination.

Now, I have a question for all you cross stitchers, and yes, it's really specifically for cross stitchers and I'm honestly interested in your answers because we cross stitchers seem to be a misunderstood lot and that really, truly bugs me. I mean I wake up in a sweat at night pondering the issue of cross stitchers being misunderstood by major chain craft stores(and please don't yell at me for that, for some people, it's their only way to purchase supplies, even in this day and age there are stitchers don't know anything beyond the cross stitch aisle at Micheals, AC Moore or JoAnns, and I'm sure there are some yarnie folk that find those same stores their only source of knitting and crochet supplies) and publishers.

So here are some questions I'd love answered either in comments or on your blog and if you post your answer on your blog please leave a link in the comments so we can all read your insights.

1)Why do you stitch?

2) On a scale of 1-10 with 1 being least important and 10 being most important what is your cross stitch passion level?

3)If you're only option for cross stitch supplies and patterns happened to be the major chain craft stores would you just walk away from the little X? Kiss it goodbye?

4)Also are you so passionate about cross stitch that if indeed your only option was the major chain craft stores, would that inspire you to create your own cross stitch pieces because you have to stitch and you've stitched your way through the whole of Dimensions catalog--because you must stitch and the thought of life without a relationship with the little X leaves you feeling empty?

5)Finally what do the cross stitch magazines on the market offer you? Do they relate to you as a cross stitcher? Do you look at them and think to yourself, who do they think buys this magazine? I guess what I'm asking, when you see the current cross stitch magazines do they make you feel like they know their readers or do you find it's more of the same? What could they do to be ambassadors for the art of cross stitch other than putting a sampler on the cover with "F-U" on it? What are we missing on a PR level that could change the opinion of cross stitch itself?

6) And finally, finally, do you do other crafts and if so what are they and why do they pull you away from cross stitch?

I've been thinking about this a lot, particularly question five. What are we missing as a group and are we missing it because we just don't care? I have to say as someone who uses the F word no less than 10 times a day, the shock value of F-U on a sampler does nothing for me but I can see where a 13 yr old girl might get a kick out of stitching that on sampler for a friend to just be uh, wild and all rebel girl you know, but in the long run, in the big picture, is stitching a raunchy sampler something that will keep a girl stitching for the rest of her life? I know that I've been stitching since I was young, very young. I became passionate about cross stitching at 13. With a brief break, well 4-6 years I'm not exactly sure, it was a period of what I now know was postpartum depression mixed with lack of sleep, I have stitched consistently since I was 13. Thirteen! And it didn't take an F bomb to keep me stitching. So are we cross stitchers just a different breed of crafter, do we take life slow and easy, does it mean we have this inner stick-to-it-tiveness that gets us through those projects that last not days, weeks, months but years?

Who are we? Tell your story, fill in the blanks, and let's hope that someone in publishing, in the craft industry, wakes up and sees us as important as knitters and scrapbookers because I have been making the rounds and let me tell you, the craft stores are not reaching out to new cross stitchers by any stretch of the imagination, even if you find JCS or CS&N in a major chain craft store, chances are you won't be able to find the supplies you need for a project out of the magazine. That's seriously messed up.

I have to say that the knitting movement has left me speechless because in all honesty I find knitting as tedious and boring and fussy as cross stitch can be at times. I want to stress AT TIMES because on a scale of 1-10 my cross stitch passion is 11. I am a very nasty person if I don't get to stitch everyday and you know how one is supposed to prioritize one's life, well cross stitch is right behind family for me and some days it's before family because I can get as equally annoyed with my cross stitch as I can my family so I swap them out quite often. I also wanted to add, that I do knit, I enjoy it, there's nothing more relaxing than a garter stitch scarf or something that is endless stockinette. I did not mean to insult any knitters reading this, I want to be a master knitter one day.

I will be honest and say that while I buy CS&N and JCS on a regular basis I no longer subscribe to them because for a time I had to wonder if they had a clue. Both magazines seem to be on track these days but I often wonder if I just got lucky with this or that issue.

OK I realize this post isn't as well thought out as I would have liked* but I'd love to read your responses, hook up with your blogs and see if we can shake up the whole needleart industry because I'm really sad at the current state of cross stitch in the mainstream craft world. Sure there's a huge group of us that know the secret world of the LNS and the ONS and how to rock our cross stitch world but what about all those people that are at the mercy of the major chain craft stores for whatever reason, think about what they are missing out on, and how can we fix that. How can we be Oprah for cross stitch? What can we do to make a difference? To spread the word? To funk up the little X?

*wanted to add that my family came in when I was mid-post, I totally lost my train of thought, so please excuse any grammatical or spelling errors I missed or if it appears that my mind wandered because, well, it did!