Ranadok …finally remembered his login info

17Jan/100

Doki Doki Cross Stitch

December was crazy, but January is slowly getting better. I finally found some time to finish this post, which has been sitting half-completed for well over a month, so LUCKY YOU.

Once I finished my first Zelda stitch, I went back to the series that I started with, Super Mario Brothers. The logical next game to do was Super Mario Brothers 2, the bizarre non-Mario Mario game that was actually a modification of the Japanese Doki Doki Panic created when it was decided by Nintendo that the 'real' SMB2 was too hard for western gamers. Interestingly, SMB2 (the North American version) was the first one I ever played, and one of the few games on the NES that I actually played to completion. It's still a little weird, though.

Turnips? Seriously?

3Nov/090

The Legend of Cross Stitch

The Mario cross-stitch worked out fairly well, so when I went looking for an idea for the pattern for my next project, I didn't stray too far from that concept. I didn't want to just move on to the next Mario game (Mario 2 is the black sheep of the family, after all), so I went to the other major Nintendo classic that was born in that era. I think it turned out quite well:

I hate those Zolas

So much blue...

1Nov/090

Pumpkin party time

I am not a great fan of Halloween. There is something about the practice of dressing up and going door to door asking for candy that is just a little weird. The whole 'people should be frightened' mentality is also a little strange (I dislike horror movies for the same reason). I don't avoid every part of Halloween, though. There is something about pumpkin carving (and the big orange squash in general) that is very appealing. It's an interesting medium, and it's more than a little fun to work with. I don't bother with the usual scary faces, spiders, or bats, though. I try to be a little less 'Halloween' and a little more 'look at this wacky pumpkin'.

Last year, we had a bunch of pumpkins growing in our back yard. The vines ended up pretty much taking over the rest of the garden, but we did get some impressive specimens as a result.

How we got that cat-shaped one, Ill never know...

How we got that cat-shaped one, I'll never know...

There was one more that was even larger than the big one there, but it was chopped up and frozen by the time this picture was taken (we are still going through it - muffins, pies, and so on). There were also a few more that weren't worth picking (tiny little guys). It was an impressive haul, considering that the previous year's harvest was just a single sad-looking guy. As you can see, we carved two of them (the green ones, orange is so cliche...). A closer look at them are in the full post, as well as this year's attempt.

Filed under: Projects Continue reading
30Sep/090

8-bit Stitch

The Go To 10 project took me literally years to do, between all the starting and stopping and generally being very slow at it. If I were to do the same thing today, I could probably get it done in a few days. Anyhow, after I finished that project and stared at it for a while (now what?), I moved on to something new. I don't know exactly why I decided to do another, but I did. Of course, I didn't want to do the usual flowers and kittens and whatnot (why would I?). So, what could I find that had simple, solid blocks of color, variety in design, and was also sufficiently interesting to be worth focusing on for a significant amount of time?

4Sep/093

10 Home

What you are looking at (and probably already know all about) is my first cross stitch project.  I don't recall when I started it, but it took me several years to finally finish it (and that was several years ago). It didn't take me that long because it was hard (it wasn't), but because I didn't work on it for more than a few days at a time with months of ignoring it in between. I made the pattern myself (with some help) from a screengrab of a Futurama episode. I thought it was funny, so I asked my mom to make it for me. She said I should do it myself, and so I did.

GoTo10Source

Oh, yeah. I'm cool.

And yes, I do know that the result of that bit of 'code' would be an unending HOME SWEET HOME SWEET HOME... that's part of the joke.

Filed under: CrossStitch 3 Comments