[caption id=”attachment_657” align=”alignleft” width=”300” caption=”Yet another old lady past-time.”]
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While I was in Chicago recently for a few work conferences that were back to back, conversations with girlfriends and boyfriends often turned to DIY and the crafting movement. All the cool kids are doing it, it seems. Now I’m no stranger to the DIY/crafting world as I’ve been dabbling on and off for a few years, including but not limited to the following:
- knitting
- caligraphy
- Excessively Diverting1
- photography
But the one that seems to be all the rage in my circles is cross-stitch. I can name half a dozen people off the top of my head who currently count this as their number one crafting past-time. Their constant yammering about their projects, and since it seems you really don’t need to know how to do much other then thread a needle and sew, appealed to me. I like the idea that it is essentially paint by numbers, but with thread. (I will also admit TheHusband has asked me to put the knitting needles down as my hats keep getting more and more interesting. The latest one ended up shaped like a used condom.)
Since having an instant support group for any kind of activity appealed to me, I took myself off to Hobby Lobby tonight after work to get supplies. Since I was not fond of getting a pattern that was “of the lord” or of a fruit basket, I bought a bag of 150 colors of floss, rolled up tube of cross-stich fabric, a hoop, needles, and other accouterments as seen in the picture above. I figured I come home, have dinner, find a pattern, and go. And if I hated it, I would pawn the lot off to Kristin.
No. Not that simple.
The cross-stitch world is complicated. The surge for wanting things handmade has increased the amount of information on the topic, which makes sense since there are thousands nay millions of pages on just about any topic in the universe, according ye olde googles. But I’m a librarian! I should be able to find stuff easily. No, not quite true either. Bad taxonomy and tag stuffing also thwarted my plans. After an hour of looking for patterns, for an easy one I could do in a few hours, turned out to be horribly wrong. I had thought of coughing up a few bucks to Subversive Cross Stitch, whom I long amired, only to find as I was going through their patterns, nothing appealed.
Kristin suggested creating my own pattern, using something like MyPhotoStitch to generate the colors and patterns for me. But the problem is that I wanted to do something BIG AND FLASHY vroom vroom, when I still need training wheels. So instead of creating something that requires 44 different flavors of floss, I need something that has say, eight. Tomorrow when I’m not feeling so emotionally drained, I’ll probably create a TARDIS or something Doctor Who related.
And hopefully this time, nothing will come out shaped like a used condom.
1. The proof that I broke even on my investment with Excessively Diverting proved to me that I could make and sell something of my own creation, which is a huge confidence boost. Now only if could apply that to other things in my life.
This is on sale for $.50 on Amazon! (FIFTY FUCKING CENTS!)
“soft dalek, warm dalek
little ball of hate
happy dalek, sleepy dalek
EX-TER-MI-NATE”
(via themarysue)
[caption id=”attachment_59” align=”alignleft” width=”300” caption=”A Wordle I recently made of the entirety of PRIDE AND PREJUDICE. Posted to Tumblr AND Pinterest, natch.”]
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The last couple of weeks have been particularly vivid and that may have to do with the following in no particular order:
Battlestar Galactica
TheHusband and I began watching Battle Star Galactica several weeks ago and we’re almost finished with S3. He has remarked BSG is “…like Downton Abbey, except in space,” which I can totally get behind. When I almost accused a student recently of treason when they asked for books on Cicero AND I had been mildly hallucinating the parking lot elevators are Cyclons, I told TheHusband we needed to take a break from the action, though for the last few BSG-free nights he’s been a titch antsy in not getting his fix.
Pinterest
I’ve become slightly addicted to Pinterest. I blame Jessica, whom I met recently in California while we were in a nearly week long training workshop together, for this problem though to be fair I should actually blame Amy because it was because of her that I obtained a Pinterest account many moons ago to stalk her shopping choices since our tastes are so similar, even though the only thing pinned on my boards these months was a Doctor Who inspired hoodie until Jessica rekindled that Pinterest fire. Regardless of whom I blame, I’ve started using it heavily these last few weeks to track all things visual, much as I used to clip visual things to Evernote. (The problem with clipping things to Evernote, however, was that for visual things it is almost (but not quite) useless where textual, Evernote rocks my socks.) With Pinterest, I’m starting to see patterns emerge (I’m love things that are orange, for example) but having that visual pinboard is making it a lot easier to track wants/needs for things to buy or wish for AND I’m also going to start using Pinterest for several of my departments that I liase to at work, such as Fashion and Interiors and the visual arts. THAT last bit is why I’m super excited about using Pinterest since it will be awesome to interact with students on the site to create projects and what not.
Plus Pinterest is great for keeping track of my future husbands.
Tumblr
The best way to describe Tumblr is that it’s for those things that are longer than 140 characters but does not quite warrant a full blog post. I’m certainly not new to Tumblr as I’ve been trolling that site for ages, but I’m not very active in posting to the site though I am a heavy reader and follower. Tumblr is great for getting that fandom fix (i.e. Doctor Who, Downton Abbey, Cabin Pressure, et al) but I’ve never really used it for curating content until I stumbled upon this article to litify my Tumblr dashboard. This article cinched that Tumblr is more than just a bunch of teenagers reposting animated gifs of various fandoms all over the place, so it’s nice to new content being added that does not contain an OMG or ballz reference somewhere.
I’ve often described Pinterest as Etsy’s Treasury function married with Tumblr, but in terms of curating content beyond just images, Pinterest isn’t robust to do that while Tumblr handles video AND audio in addition to text and images. How to decide to post what is what? Images get cross posted to both sites, while links/videos/songs/etc are posted to Tumblr. I’ve started feeding my blog into Tumblr after the Blog Disaster of 2011 because there is a built in community aspect to Tumblr that doesn’t exist (yet) in Pinterest or even in Twitter, Facebook, or Google+. Tumblr’s tagging and search makes it so easy to find and follow topics of interest that it’s almost criminal. Pinterest is great for finding visual inspiration and ideas in digital boards of my choosing, while Tumblr is for that get-quick fix tapping the multimedia vein of fandom delights.
Google Reader
I decided 2012 was going to be the year of simplification and ditching the very high signal to noise ratio. I started by cleaning up my Google Reader account, in which I was hoarding subscriptions to sites like Imelda Marcos hoarded shoes.
After doing away with my ultra narrow categorization method in which I had dozens of tags, I lumped the feeds into broader groups and removed content that I was getting duplicates from. So if I followed them on Twitter, Facebook, and had a RSS feed to their site, I removed/unfollowed/unliked the method I was least likely able to get info. Much how many Tumblr accounts I followed were reblogging of other Tumblr accounts, I also ditched sites that were link feeders and rebloggers. I also marked READ all stories older than a week and if that was stil unwieldily, older then a day.
With my Reader account now squeaky clean, I find I’m more apt to read (and post items of interest to Pinterest, Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook) and stay more up to date with news and events before, specifically in blogs and sites that are geared to interests that I don’t follow anywhere else (fairy tales, calligraphy, and other such things).
biblyotheke.net
Last, but not least, I’ve been spending a lot of time hacking the backend of my website to make it just so. While I love the original theme, my few tweaks to move some objects around has grown into a almost redesign that looks almost nothing like the original theme that it is based on. I also found a color palette that I just adore that I’ve also started incorporating into here. Some things are stil a bit off, but I’m excited as it starts to come together.
And that is what has been consuming me as of late. What about you?
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TARDIS display plate by Kristin! on Flickr.
A hand-painted display plate of a TARDIS.
