Yep it’s all her fault. She made me look at etsy.

Then I jsut had to buy a few things like the monsters and who can go past nessy.
That was almot a week ago… then today it got worse, much worse.

There was another link… there was browsing and searching and now I must make Amigurumi Cthulhu. I need to make happy little plushy amigurumi elder gods for everyone! Then I can go on and make a plushy amigurumi undead horde!.

I’m doomed even more so than the santas.

Doomed I say! I don’t even really know how to crochet… at leat I think I can do a simple chain.

For so long I was happy marvelling at the wonderful crazy creations of jellibat but now… now the call to create spooky little plushies is too strong to resist…. and it’s all her fault.

*pout*

I don’t suppose anyone has found it have they?

I’m behind on my emails again and my blogging but I guess that happens when all that life stuff gets in the way.
I have gotten a little stitching done though *cheers*. I had a new start for QS Wed which I will be alternating with FIRE (once I frog out thelittle mistake I made on her). I started “Lost” by Lisa Victoria, a little pixie sent me some HAED charts during the week and he was one of them. I jsut couldn’t resist that gorgeous little dragon for the life of me. No pics though as all I have done is a rather uninteresting row of 400-500 stiches of 310. Next time he comes out though I will be putting some stitches into his little butterfly friend

In other stitchy new those Santas of Doom have increased thier number from 8 to 9 meaning I am 75% done and have 3 to finish before now and christmas Eeeep! I still keep telling myself I will make it.

Thanks to everyone for the input on my colour conundrum. I will be restarting it (avoiding thr frogging for now) the piece of fabric I have is big enough for me to restart without frogging which will save me some precious time as well. I’ll go with the popular choice of passionfruit and hopefully will haev soem progres to show on it after this weekend. That is if I don’t end up spending all my spare time on santas and my round robin

In case your interested to see the ever growing legion of the Santas of Doom here is a rather dodgey pictue of the 9 so far with my trivial start on the tenth

I have decided to stitch the Passione Ricamos Arabesque ‘E’ as a gift for christmas. I am stithcing it over one on strawberry milkshake lugana from silkweaver. My problem is the floss colour. I asked Mr B to choose between a selection of threads that I was thinking about and he chose Carribean Eve from Vicki Clayton. Lovely colour fabulous thread but after stitching on it I am not sure it is really working.

Add to the problem the fact that I am planning on mounting this in a dark oak box and the lighter tones of the Caribbean Eve silk seem to clash all the more. So…. I need opinions. Should I continue with the Caribbean Eve or scrap what I have and start again with a different floss? Also which floss colour would you reccommend? I have gotten all paranoid now and don’t want to go back to it until I get a few opinions.
Unfortunately the colours in the picture aren’t quite right but I think it gives you an idea. The fabric is quite a soft pink with only small amounts of mottling unlike the picture in the silkweaver site.

The other thread choices I am thinking of are Needlepaints 2011 which is shown with the caribbean eve as a floss toss or VC blackberry or passionfruit, these both have similar colours but the blackberry is a bit darker with a more blue tone to it. The other thing I haev eben considering is that the person it is for has a burgundy / wine thing going in thier room so the lighter colours may not fit. It is for my father girlfriend.. though calling someone who is 60 his girlfriend seems somewhat odd :p

So please be harsh, be honest I htink I have an idea of which way I want to jump but need some other opinions and you guys always have plenty of good advice especially about thread and fabrics.

It’s late but I have finally put the finishing touches on the invitations for my fathers 80th Birthday. They go out in the post tomorrow, thankfully I have managed to ring most people to let them know the details. If I waited until they got the invites it would have just been too short notice for most people. Better late than never though.

They turned out okay for  not really knowing what I was going to do. Trying to find non girly papers that I could use to put the invitations together with was a lot harder than I expected but the stars seem to work well. I wanted to get little ufo stickers for them but there were none to be found anywhere, next week I am sure I will see them every time I turn around. My father is a big sci-fi fantasy fan so they would have been a nicec little touch. The little R medallion at the top is actually silver not gold, the colours are a bit off because of the lighting as for the strange angle of the picture… umm my excuse is that it is late and well it is the only one that was clear of the few I took. So do you think they pass for 80th Birthday invitations?

I know I shouldn’t be thinking of starting stitching after midnight but a few stitches won’t hurt will it?…just a few stitches
Tomorrow will be another crazy day of organising in between scoping out the new IKEA store for shelving to organise my workspace at home so I can regain control of all the paper that define my PhD.

I have a stitching pic to share tomorrow too…. I need colour advice, more on that next post though.

bye bye for now

Today’s SBQ was suggested by Jan and is:

How many different brands of “complete” embroidery floss sets do you
own? How do you keep track of it? (i.e., spread sheet program, index
cards, palm pilot, etc.)

Well I don’t think I own a complete set of anything. I was workimng through getting all teh colour sample packs of blending filament for a while but lost interest once I started stitching mostly HAEDs. There didn’t seem too much of a reason to be collecting specialty threads like kreinik for over 1 projects.

I am close to a full set of DMCs and I am still working at putting together a list of the ones that I don’t have. I haev so many skeins of thread around seeing as I kit each of my HAED project individually. I am trying to build a seperate set of DMC though so I can start any project that takes my fancy and not worry about if I have the right threads.

I must confess to now having a significant number of vikki clayton silks too. As for keeping track… I don’t. I have the best of intentions to start spreadsheet or some wuch but I would rather spend my free tiem sititching not working on data entry

No it’s not as funny as Arrgh it’s the Mr Hell show … really what could be?

Wordpress just ate my blog update *cries* twice even *cries more*
So here is the optioned down “lite” version. No witty remarks or thoughtful discussion just the picture:
(Japanese Garden wip 2)

Oh and a little mild panic: have less than 18 days to organise a surprise 80th b’day party and I only got the prospective guest list and contact details on sunday. Woot!

Dreamworld was fantastic. Even with the overcast rainy weather. At least the rain decreases the number of people willing to run around an amusement park getting sopping wet. Not me though hehe. by the end of the day I had been on the big drop, the claw (5 times) and the cyclone as well as most of the other rides on offer. I am such a ride junkie.

Probably the biggest hilight of the day though was the tigers at the Tiger Island presentation. Pretty Kitties!

I had thought about us all going and having our photos taken (you get 15 mins with the tiger, you get to touch it etc etc and have a slew of pictures taken for up to a group of four). At $395 for 15 mins though sanity kicked in and I decided not to. I didn’t want the photos I just wanted to touch the kitty!

Anyway here is a selection of my favourite pics from the day. More can be found here (you can see larger images in the gallery if you click on them too) and Nic I have loads more if you want to oggle piccies of the big cats
Kitty up a tree

Tongue Pokey

And my favourite of the day probably: Sleepy Dingos

I’m off to Dreamworld today!

Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeee updatey bits when I get back from riding all the rides
Oh and my hair has faded to a bright, bright pink colour I must fix this sometime over the weekend.

Last night we took Mr Adam to one of my favourite restaurants “Anise“. Essentially it is an ala carte bar/ bistro that serves a great selection of french wines/chmpagnes/apertifs and Absinthe. The staff are wonderfully friendly and fun to boot.

It was top of the list on must go to places for Adams visit seeing as Absinthe is still a banned substance in the USA and we never got around to getting some on our trip to Canada (You can get Absinthe in British Columbia). Not sure why they are still holding to an outdated ban on absinthe in the United States, but they are.

The selection of absinthes in stock was a lot bigger than the last time we were there with a vriety of spanish absinthes available as well as teh usual array of czeck, french and german varieties. I dared the Spanish Black Absinthe which has an alcohol content of 85% and quite surprisingly was very smooth and palatable. The unfortunate side effect was it eft me wishing I could source where to buy a bottle for home which is highly unlikely. I took piccies of the bottle though to remind me what it looked like. It is imported into australia by a Melbourne compnay so I am going to have to do some investigating. I would love to get a bottle as a gift for a friend.

Adam tried the Mr Jekyll which is a German Absinthe I have had before yet still struggle to find readily availble for purchase around brisbane. People keep telling me they can find it but it still eludes me. Recently I did find a source for the parisian Le Fee though adnd even got a funky Le Fee absinthe spoon with the bottle

The food was delicious and the new spring menu did not disappoint. I had the Duck Confit with gnochi and baked fennel in an orange and absinthe sauce mmmmmmmm. Mr B experimented with the Fruits De Mer and discovered he does not like mussels, thankfully there was quite the selection of other seafood morsels he did enjoy. and Adam tried the Beef which looked really scrummy. We all ended the night with a selection of cheeses (served with truffled honey, fesh apple, pear, muscatels and pecan nuts) and a to die for bottle of 1987 vintage portugese port. The port was more than worth every cent of the $50 price tag. It pretty much just evaporated in a burst of glorious flavour as soon as it hit your taste buds. Pity it was the very last bottle.

On the way home we stopped at the kangaroo point cliffs to snap a few shots of the Brisbane city skyline at night, my camera skills are still somewhat lacking but I managed few shots with my little digital that I am quite happy with.

All in all it was a truly splendid evening with fabulous company food and drinks and I highly reccommend anise to anyone visiting the brisbane area. Just be sure to book because they only have a total of 16 seats in the restaurant.

I have been very slack with the last few stitching bloggers Questions that were sent out.

So heres this weeks one and then the ones I missed too

Today’s SBQ was suggested by Lee
and is:

How did you decide on the title of your stitching blog? Was it random,
or does it have a special meaning to you or about you?

My blog title is a Song by Depeche Mode… why I chose the song “sweetest condition” I am not really sure. It isn’t my favourite depeche mode song but it is up there in the top however many . The lyrics can be found here

And now for the ones I missed:

From the 25th of October

Today’s SBQ was suggested by Carol and is:

If you were to come across a sampler chart that caught your eye and
appealed to you, would you or would you not stitch it if it had a
morbid or “creepy” saying on it? If not, why?

Sure! Morbid and creepy is right up my alley. I would be more likely to stitch a sampler along a morbid and “creepy theme than most others. Well other than the ink circles ones I have fallen for although they are not so much the traditional style of samplers in my mind. I have slowly been coming across a few samplers I want to stitch which in and of itself was a surprise. But the fudgey finds some pretty special designs to tempt us all.

And lastly from the 18th of October

Today’s SBQ was suggested by Vash and is:

Which way do you stitch, i.e. do you stitch /// followed by \\\ on
top, or the other way around \\\ followed by ///? Are you left- or
right-handed and do you think that this affects the way that you stitch?

I’m a right handed stitcher and stitch /// by \\\. I don’t think it is handedness as Nic stitches the opposite way as does Nancy. I think it comes down to how you learnt. I know I just looked on the back of a TW leaflet (storyteller) which was my first cross stitching attempt. The stitching directions said to work that way so I did. I also tend to work each stitch independently finishing each cross one at a time. At least I do for most thins I stitch now, I would do runs of one leg and then back when I stitched more Miras with all those large blocks of colour over 2.