See No Evil (or Mario)

And he’s done. Taking Mario to the store to be finished tomorrow. Sadly, that means no pictures until he is framed. My camera is still at work…

Save the Princess Quick!

I finished Mario! All I have to do now is stitch the background. I’m thinking a large box pattern of some sort.

Sorry for the lack of pics, my camera will be stuck at work until the 1st

Imagine that…

I’ve actually been stitching a lot in the past week. I stitched the belly of the dragon 3 times, before I decided to switch my thread/technique. I stitched the eyelashes twice before I decided to switch my threads/technique. I stitched the gils and got em right the first time. And I’ve been working away at Mario, finishing the blue, yellow, and both browns. Unfortunately, I left my camera and work and it will live there until July 1. See, we go on our 1-week summer break tomorrow at 1pm. I, however, started my break around 1 today because I have a fever. One of my students has had a fever for a few days now, and I’m not optimistic about my health over the next few days. Therefore, I will probably be stitching a lot but I won’t be able to share it with you. I might take a few shots through the camera in the computer, but they are low quality (and mirror image).

So in the meantime, use your imagination 🙂

Mario’s Stash

On Saturday, I took an early morning trip to my LNS to pick up the Flair I needed for my Dragon. Of course, I ended up coming home with materials for another project as well…

Last week, I acquired a color printer/scanner from my aunt and uncle because they were cleaning out their surplus printers. I’ve been surviving the past few months without a printer, so I am very excited! The first thing that came to mind was, of course, new needlepoint projects. I have seen several people adapt images into needleworks, and now I finally had the opportunity to try it myself.

First, I printed a piece of graph paper that was close to 18 lines/inch. Then, I printed my image on top of the graph. Of course, my image was MARIO!!!

Next, I started the painstaking process of translating the image onto blank 18mesh canvas I picked up at my LNS. I made a few guidelines both on the image and on the blank canvas at every 10 lines just to help myself along while translating. While the whole process took a while, it really wasn’t very difficult. The fact that this picture has nice, clear, black borders definitely helped me out a lot. This took a few hours, but I did i most of it while watching the Yanks trounce the Mets (Why oh why did I go to the one game that was rainy and the Yankees lost???)

Finally, I took a Sharpie and colored over the black borders, and some of the sections. I bought a brown Sharpie for this project, too, but I think the brown is going to look to similar to the black so I’ll hold off on coloring that in for now and see how well the threads cover before I decide what I’m going to do about it.

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.I’m very excited to start stitching the piece…and about the possibilities my printer will open up for me!

Melts in your mouth

First, the mouth of the dragon…

Since my last update, I’ve stitched the dark blue of the belly and the spikes both in a simple continental stitch. I started to stitch the belly in Flair, only to realize that what I had was a skein of blue Flair, but the white I had was Frosty Rays. I’m still trying to figure out all of the different varieties from Rainbow Gallery, but I now know that Frosty Rays are like Flair, but have a strand of Tiara metallic running throgh it. This means that while it gives a similar shimmer and has the same outer texture, it lays a lot higher on the canvas. They are NOT interchangeable. My plan tomorrow is to go to my new LNS to pick up white Flair so I can do the belly, eyelash, and…gill?

Next, the mouth of the Micks.

Ever since I saw the first commercial for M&Ms Strawberried Peanut Butter, I’ve been a girl on a mission. I am a sucker for any sort of new food (just ask my mom about our search for a Brach’s candy that was advertised but never came out in stores!). So, last week I went out to several different grocery/convenience stores to try to find them with no success, but today I came out victorious!!! In fact, not only did I find the M&Ms, but I also found yellow Snickers. I hadn’t heard of them before this trip, and I have no idea if they are supposed to taste different, but I figured I’d better scoop them up when I had the opportunity

Obviously, I had to break into the Strawberried Peanut Butter M&Ms right away

Verdict: I’m glad I tried them, but I wouldn’t get them again. They definitely have a strawberry flavor to them, though interestingly it was not the peanut butter that was strawberried, but the chocolate (yes, I really did dissect them to find out). I just don’t think the strawberry flavor added much to the candy – I’ll stick with regular peanut butter M&Ms when my candy craving hits again.

Happy Friday everyone!!! Only one more week before my (7 day) summer break begins!

The New Stadium

Last summer I had a Friday night partial season ticket plan to Yankee Stadium, and I have to say it was the BEST part of living in Harlem. 20 min from my door to the Stadium. Beautiful. This year, I’m living a little farther away so I didn’t get season tickets. I was, however, able to get tickets for 2 games in the pre-sale. Last Sunday I went to my first game in the new Yankee Stadium. IT IS GORGEOUS!!! The stadium just gives off a bright and airy  feel to it. The Great Hall, which was honestly a bit of a disappointment to me because it was much smaller than I thought it would be (it only extends around home plate, and I had in my mind that it went around the whole ballpark and was the main place to go for food, etc), but it did have fantastic sky-lights which allowed the sun to shine right through.

The consession stands were pretty awesome. I had the eggplant parm sub, and it’s AMAZING! I definitely recommend it for anyone going to the Stadium. One of the new things about this stadium compared to the old stadium is that the concession area is open to the ballpark. While this is supposed to give an open feel and allow spectators to see the game while they are getting food, I found it actually to be a bit of a drawback. Mid-game, I went out to get some Carvel from a cart. The cart was far enough away that you couldn’t see the game, but apparently too close to warrant a TV or radio, so I felt like a missed a good chunk of the game waiting in line for ice cream – but my cousin, who went for a pretzel, reported back to me that the consession booths have TVs and so she didn’t miss anything (but her pretzel was sub-par).

Another part of the Stadium that has been highly talked up by the media is the scoreboard, and it definitely does not dissapoint! The big scoreboard is HUGE. But, more importantly, it’s as clear as can be.

Yeah, that Yankees graphic is the scoreboard and the Delta ad is printed. You can’t tell the different. The scoreboard was also great about showing replays, so if you miss anything good for the Yanks, you can see it over and over (but…they don’t show replays about the other team, which was a little frustrating on close plays)

All in all, I give the new stadium and A+. The fact that the Yanks won didn’t hurt, either

LNS

I found a new local needlepoint shop, and boy am I excited!!!!!!!

On a whim this morning I decided to search again for needlepoint shops in the area. Since I moved back to Jersey in January, I have been using the needlepoint shop near my parents’ house, which is about an hour away. When that store closed in Feb (?), I was left without store to go to. There is one in the town where I work, but I was pretty disappointed in their selection — they were definitely a knitting store with a few needlepoint items, not a needlepoint store. Then, today I found one that’s 10 minutes from my house and FANTASTIC. Although their store name suggests that they carry cross-stitch, not needlepoint, I was excited to find out they had both, and a quality selection of threads!

I didn’t pick up any projects today, though. I still have the 2 dragons to work on, and I’m pretty certain I’m going to sign up for the CyberWorkshop offered by ANG. I simply fell in love with this design when I saw it months ago. Blue, hearts, and interesting stitches — what more could you want in a design???

I was a little surprised by the pricing when it was released on Tuesday, because their by-mail classes are more affordable, but I think I’m going to suck it up anyway because I REALLY want to stitch the piece. In addition to the high cost of registration, the thread suggestions are crazy-expensive. I started pricing it online through some online retailers and it was coming close to $200 when I finally gave up and decided that if I am going to do this, it will have to be with some more affordable thread substitutions.

Enter – my new favorite LNS. The wonderful woman I met there said she would help me chose the right thread kit for this project — changing colors if I want, and definitely substituting more affordable threads. She also invited me to join their stitching group on alternate Monday nights (and we traded email addresses).

Now I’m inspired to go stitch and watch the Yankee game. Next post will either be an update on the stitching I accomplish today…or a photo gallery of the YANKEE GAME TOMORROW!!!!!!

Ocean Vacation

Sorry for the lack of posts this past week. I went on vacation last weekend to California to visit some friends from college and grad school, and I’ve taken this whole week to recuperate from my vacation! As such, I haven’t touch any of my needlepoint projects (boo) but I did get some reading done on the plane — finished Seed to Harvest by Octavia Butler (AWESOME), read Talk to the Hand by Lynne Truss (big disappointment…loved Eats, Shoots, and Leaves, but I would not recommend this book), and I’m halfway through The Gd of Small Things by Arundhati Roy (so far so good).

^^ WARNING ^^ Those links are to Wikipedia and may contain spoilers!!!!

I’ll dig back into my reserve of completed pieces so I don’t leave you without some sort of stitching for too long.

This was one of my earlier pieces. It’s all continental stitch, but I probably took liberties with the colors…

When finishing the piece, the framer added some sort of fancy backing so that some of the fish puff out from the frame. It’s a VERY cool effect!

The following piece is from my grandmother’s collection. Although I can’t be sure, I bet these two pieces were done by the same artist and my grandmother’s piece represents the colors selected by the artist. This one is currently on display in my aunt’s house