anonymityblaize

So I made a Ron Swanson cross stitch to go with my Leslie Knope one! And now I can check one thing off my things-to-post list. Hurrah!



And if anyone wants the pattern just let me know!  ( Here's the pattern... )

I am going to give my thoughts on the Avengers time to percolate until it's out in the US and I can't perpetrate accidental spoilers. But I think it's fair to say that the capslock of squee will be out in force for that entry. I'm off to see it again tonight in fact. It's that good. But I'll shut up now.

Instead, I'll post a little piece of Thor and Loki craftage that I made ages ago and kept forgetting to post until now. I think this is officially Geek Lamp 3: <Insert terrible Asgardian pun here.>


( More pics... )

A few years ago Mister Blaize and I made a decision to get those nifty Cineworld unlimited cards. It's turned out to be a very smart decision financially, considering how many movies we go see. But it does occasionally lead to crazypants decisions like going to the cinema three times in the space of a week, the same week as we also went to see a Cirque du Soleil show. So my brain entirely melted from cultural over stimulus and I had to hide with a duvet over my head.

They were four very different experiences though, and I feel like I ought to be able to write a post on each one, but my blogging-fu has weakened due to lack of use of late, so the 100 things challenge is a very well timed bandwagon for me to jump upon. I think I'm going to do 100 things that I get ridiculously overenthusiastic about, and break it down into tens - 10 songs, 10 books , 10 movies etc. etc. Join me, won't you?




{Take the 100 Things challenge!}

So, some brief thoughts on my week of too many things, as a warm up exercise.

Cirque's Alegria was as stunning as Cirque shows always are. Especially a pair of female contortionists who were so flipping bendy I sometimes was confused about what body part was where. On the cinema front, Headhunters was totally not what I was expecting, in a totally good way. It's a Norwegian thriller co-starring that dude who plays Jamie Lannister in Game of Thrones with that name I can't spell and can't be arsed to google right now. If you like a good art-crime/chase movie then see it if you can. Battleship on the other hand, I'd avoid like the plague. It makes the Transformer movies look like masterpieces. It really is as bad as the reviews are saying. I love me some Taylor Kitsch and Alexander Skarsgaard and it wasn't even worth it for them. Rihanna (Riannha? Rhianna? Another name I can't be done with spell checking.) was the best thing about this movie, and put in a performance actually resembling a human being, unlike any one else, which was really weird. Also, this a movie about ships that doesn't actually understand how water works which is beyond distracting. I went in with low expectations and was still disappointed, that is how bad this film is. I suffered, you shouldn't have to. And then at the other end of the spectrum was Cabin in the Woods - probably the most fun I've had in the cinema in a good long while. It wasn't as scary as I'd expected (I went in pretty blind, which is how I'd recommend seeing it - the less you know the more fun it is, I would imagine) but it more than made up for it in demented creativeness and a joyful reveling in horror movie tropes and cliches. I'll shut up about it now lest I end up in spoiler territory. Though I will add that I now reeeeeeally want Hollywood to wake up and cast Fran Kranz in more things. Although I do think that of a lot of Whedon alums.

I've been lax in posting pics of my Leslie Knope cross stitch, but I have managed to stick to taking the pictures every day. So here's a huge clump of them all in one. Should have her all finished and framed and ready to post tomorrow, which feels very appropriate with Parks & Rec being back tonight. I'm very excited - it's the first time since I started watching Parks that it and Community have been on at the same time. So I'll probably have another overload from awesome - It's terrible; I'm turning into some Victorian lady with the vapours. At this rate I'll explode by the time the Avengers have assembled! Anyway, here's some Leslie pics: ( Lots of pics under the cut... )

And finally, in this post of ill-fitting-together things, the Magic Mike trailer. I am simultaneously mocking it and also thinking it looks awesome. And I can already anticipate how absolutely ridiculous its fandom will be.

Hello, internets. I went into lurker mode for a bit there. I tend to do that when I'm a bit stressed out. Sorry if anyone's been expecting comments or anything from me, but I'm getting back in the swing of it now. I've still got a backlog of crafty stuff I need to post, and I really need to go on a new icon hunt at some point soon (I needs me some parks & rec and avengers icons stat!), but I'm going to ease myself back into the whole actually-participating-in-fandom thing by showing y'all the new cross stitch project I've been working on while I've been grumpy and brooding offline.

So, when I'm done I should have something like this:


It's moving on pretty quickly, but I wish I'd started this much sooner so I could use it as evidence of Leslie Knope's awesomeness that I would cross stitch her so I could persuade everyone to vote for Leslie in f_march_madness. But instead I'll just leave this here and hope you'll take it to heart!

It's finally time for me to unveil my completed Inception cross stitch! I am terribly excited about showing this off, and I hope other people like it as much as I do!

I began thinking about this project around this time last year, but didn't start stitching until towards the end of June. It took me a long time before I was happy with any of the umpty jillion patterns I tried and discarded. I noodled around with several screengrabs and whatnot of the hotel corridor fight for quite sometime before settling on doing the Arthur poster image, mainly because it had a wider range of colours than using a scene directly from the movie. I was finished the actual stitching part by the middle of November so it would seem that I keep taking around five months to do one of these cross stitches o' doom, regardless of the size of the project. (For reference, Arthur is over twice the size and contains over three times the number of stitches as my stitched Serenity, and almost double the stitches of the Enterprise one.)

At no point did I get frustrated with this project, which is a novelty to me. Not even a minor pout or kerfuffle. I can't decide if that's the reason this has been my favourite project so far, or if it is genuinely the best thing I've made. I've certainly never stitched better. The stitches and the tension are much more uniform across the piece than I've ever achieved in the past.

Here come the stats! The stitched design measures 22cm by 29cm. It contains 31,108 stitches from 25 different colours of thread. I used nearly 150 metres of those threads, and almost 50 meters of that is the very dark navy that dominates the piece.

So. Yeah. This happened.


Many more pics, and larger ones too, can be found here.

(BTW, does this count as fanart? I mean, I know it does, but could I post it to inception comms as fanart? And if so, which ones should I post it to? I am excited to show it off, but confused as to where it would be welcome. I am a bear of very little brain sometimes.)

Right, now I'm off to check my totem so I know I didn't make this beauty in a dream...

ETA: Pattern now available here.

x-posted to geekcrafts here, craftgrrl here, inceptionfilm here, inception_art here, and inception here.

I am having issues with the linear progression of time. It is all moving far faster than it ought to, I'm sure.

So, it's already that time of year to remind anyone who might be thinking of buying something from my etsy shop that the last posting dates before Christmas are -
UK: Wed 14th December (Parcelforce options available at extra cost until Tue 20th December)
Western Europe: Mon 12th December
Eastern Europe, USA and Canada: Fri 9th December
Everywhere Else: Mon 5th December

In other crafting news, Arthur is finally finished and is quite possibly the best thing I have ever stitched in my life. But you're not getting any pics until I'm happy with the framing, which currently, I am not. I want it to look its best before I unveil it to the world! Well, here's a sneaky peak of the unsightly back side of for now!

( Click for pic! )

Anyone remember when I made this lovely cross stitch o' doom?




Well, some crazy brave soul was interested in making one of their own, so here's the pattern for it.

( Read more... )

As always, feel free to do whatever you want with it, but credit or a link back here would be very much appreciated. And I'd love to see the results if anyone does stitch it!

Have returned from my family get-together. It was beyond fabulous. The usual good food, good booze, good company combo with additional aunties and uncles and added drunken dancing and general hilarity.

And brilliantly, after posting about my own amazing childhood birthday parties, my mother turned up with this as her birthday cake.


Mama Blaize for the win!

A pic of the menu from her birthday dinner (complete with wine pairings! I am so spoilt!) under the cut so you can be jealous of our gluttony.

( om nom noms )

I've missed most of the Delicious debacle while I was away, but it doesn't look pretty. I'm going to give things a few days to settle down and then look into Pinboard as that seems to be where everyone is migrating.

Then, as if I didn't already have enough fandom stuff stealing all my attention and freetime, I got into Pottermore this week. I'm RookQueen63 - let me know your name there if you'd like me to friend you. I'm a Hufflepuff (yay!) and my wand is rowan with unicorn core, 14 1/2 inches, slightly swishy. This stuff makes me more excited than a grown adult really ought to be. The site itself is pretty cool - the artwork is gorgeous and I love the way you interact with it, but if it can't handle the number of people on it at the moment, what's it going to be like when it opens fully?

And finally, some more pics of my Inception cross stitch under the cut. Eight out of sixteen pages of the pattern are complete now! But it's more like 3/4 of the way done. And I've still not reached a stage of rage yet! It's clearly a magical cross stitch project.

( stitchy stitch stitch )