one day i am going to grow wings

Yay, my xstitchexchange needleroll finally arrived! Sadly, the first one got lost in the mail between Canada and Oklahoma *shakes fist at post office*, but greenmother was nice enough to make me a replacement one. It's very pretty!

( pics under cut! )

cross-posted to xstitchexchange

I'm trying to learn more finishing techniques so I can do something with the small cross stitches I have lying around. I found directions for making pinkeeps and made this little art nouveau flower from Cross Stitch Collection magazine. It was very easy to put together and I'm tempted to make a ton more. I'm in the mood to work on small projects, they're much easier to carry around.

(AOL needs to stop crashing while I type this post. Arrrgh!) Anyways, I haven't made any crafty posts lately, so here's what I've been up to on that front.

( lots of pics under cut )
In other news, the work computers came back online on Friday afternoon in the middle of The Departed. But they're not entirely debugged, so they run ungodly slow (more than the usual insanely slow), are prone to crashing and have (OH NOES) no internets on them at all. Not even CNN or Weather.com, the latter of which would be helpful because I'd like to know if that wind out there is building up to a tornado. I'm just saying a little internets would be nice.

I started this cross stitch last Halloween but ended up putting it aside and didn't finish it until a few weeks ago. It was alright until I got to the last part where I had to backstitch the spider legs and (predictably) hated doing it. (The spider part that is, not backstitching in general. I loathe spiders.) But at least I have one Halloween project done in time ^^

Last Friday I hung out with mythicalgryphon to see The Prestige. Fun times! It was good to see Brenn again ^^ The movie was very good and certainly brought teh Pretty. As much as I enjoy watching Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman (who both are excellent here), their characters can be hard to sympathise with as they're both pretty bastardy. (I mean that in every sense.) It's quite twisty too, which I should have expected since Christopher Nolan directed Momento as well.

Off to watch Heroes now, yay.

Nothing much in particular to update on. Life is slothy as usual.

I need to stop buying/planning stitching projects. I went to the Local Needlework Store yesterday and bought the kit for Mirabilia's Halloween Fairy.


I'd seen it on the internet months ago and told myself I wouldn't buy it, but when actually faced with it at the store, I totally caved. I wasn't even that interested in doing another Mirabilia pattern initially either, but then they had to release their first Halloween design and since I love Halloween patterns, I was pretty much screwed. Also, I have about nine or so unfinished pieces that I could be working on. And *cough* countless other patterns that I've bought but haven't started on yet.

At least I will be well-occupied for the next fifty years.

yays! My mom bought me a new camera since I've been talking about one for ages now. <3! It's a Canon Powershot A610. Since I haven't had a day off since it came, I've only gotten to play with it a little bit, but I love it so far.

( What a buttload of needlework supplies looks like )

I specifically wanted a camera that had a good macro feature. So I've been running around taking extreme closeups of various things.
( colorful threads )

( +1 lone dolly pic )

Here's a picture of my latest finished cross stitch piece. . .



It's a design by Little House Needleworks called "The Bookshelf". (Sorry about the dimness and camera glare. It was hard to get a good shot of it.) It took about 2 months(? or so) to do. I'm relatively pleased with how it came out. The bottom right corner was supposed to be Wuthering Heights, but I switched it to Jane Eyre and the house became Thornfield Hall instead. I had to take out the trees to make room for the flames, but I let the unconcerned sheep graze where it was. It's probably thinking, "Ah, let the fucker burn. Mmm, grass."

In other news, work continues to kill my soul. If it weren't for the customers, it would otherwise be a great job. With this job, I went from face-to-face customer service to not having to look at them (since it's over the phone.) Now if I could just move to not having to hear their actual voices, I think I'd be okay.

The season (series?) finale of Arrested Development was on tonight. *sigh* I'm going to miss that show. So, so funny. I made my mom watch it and in the course of an hour, she went from, "This is stupid" to "Why the hell are they cancelling this?" See? See? Stupid Fox tv, you ruin all good things. They showed some previews for their new comedy shows and they looked shitty. You couldn't leave a perfectly good schedule alone, could you, Fox? Damn your eyes.

or Big Ass Projects. I never really finish the Big Ones, I just start others. I think I have maybe about 5 large projects and 3 small patterns that are in various stages of not ever going to be done. And I went to the local needle store and bought more stuff today. Whee!

( What I am more or less working on )

( More cross stitch pics behind the cut )

Not much else going on. Web blocks still up at work, hence the frantic cross-stitching in order to stave off internet withdrawal symptoms. I found the H2G2 plushies at Suncoast, so now I have a stuffed Zaphod and Marvin. Think I will take some photos of my toy collection, um, 'soon'. ('Soon' being whenever I can bring myself to get up early enough so there's sufficient sunlight to take decent pictures.)

It's been awhile since I've posted a proper update. Uh, here goes, I think...

Am now working an evening shift, which is good because I'm by nature a night person. The only bad thing about it is that those of us on night shift frequently get moved over to general sales, which I hate, hate, hate. That happened today, which made it a bad night.

Tuesday I went to the cross stitch store and bought more stash. Yay! I bought a Just Nan pattern and material for uh, another geisha pattern that I found in a magazine. (But this one is small! Minute, practically! And thus, within the realm of possibility to finish.) I think I enjoy doing smaller patterns the most. I do have some larger projects (2 geisha and 1 Mirabilia), but I find that the length of time to do those is kind of frustrating. Actually, now that I think of it, the number of works-in-progress that I have is beginning to overwhelm me. I would need a huge speed addiction to get everything done that I want to. (Fortunately, that's not a temptation as I really enjoy sleep.)

Anyway, while I was at the crack-drug shop, I finally got a charm that I've been waiting months for, so I can finally frame one of my cross stitches. Will post a piccie later.

After that, I drove around town trying to find a copy of Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, which finally came out dvd. Such a good movie. Tim Roth and Gary Oldman have excellent chemistry together.

Oh, and here is the list of movies I saw last month.
Thousand Pieces of Gold - True story of a Chinese woman who's sold into prostitution and sent to California during the late 1800's. I saw this on PBS years and years ago; it gave me a big crush on Chris Cooper for awhile.

From Hell - Finally got over my Jack the Ripper phobia long enough to watch this. The temptation of watching Johnny Depp wearing a frock coat and abusing Victorian drugs was just too much to deny. Surprisingly, not that bad.

Bright Young Things - The Paris Hiltons of 1920's Britain, but in a much less annoying way.

Bride & Prejudice - I enjoyed the Bollywood aspect a lot. Very colorful and the musical scenes were very well done. I liked the parts where Naveen Andrews from Lost danced :) Spiffy.

Zatoichi - a recent Japanese movie that didn't squick the hell out of me. Tadanobu Asano was my favorite character as the yojimbo samurai. (I'd almost be tempted to rent more of his movies, except it seems the squick factor is prevalent in his movies.) I thought the fight scenes were well done, except they were too abbreviated. And the film raises some odd questions like, "Why does Zatoichi have a blond dye job? And why are all these people tap dancing?"

The Incredibles - Cute. Funny. So overexposed that I wouldn't have watched it if my friends hadn't made me, but I'm glad they did anyway.

I <3 Huckabees - This would have been pretty funny, if it hadn't bored me with its pretentiousness.

Impromptu - Another movie I saw on PBS years ago. The true story of George Sand (played by Judy Davis) falling in love with Frederic Chopin (Hugh Grant, in a very girly wig.)Highly recommended. Davis does a wonderful job of making Sand an intriguing character. She's very a funny, ballsy person; pretty anachronistic for that time.

anyhoo....
My Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab order came in the mail today, so I'm wearing at least four different perfume samples just to try out. (Languor smells the best so far, finally an opium scent I can stand.) More stash. Ah, bliss.