Cross-stitchery

Today I want to post about some of my embroidery I have been doing....

I like embroidery because the product looks fancier and harder than it is. If you can draw a picture and thread a needle, you can embroider. And you don't even really have to be able to draw, because you can just trace pictures....of anything, which you are indeed about to see. You can embroider anything as silly as you want. The point being that an embroidered picture of a bouquet of flowers looks a lot cooler than just a pencil sketch of it on paper. And it being embroidered magically turns it from "doodle I did on a post-it
during boring conference call" to "wow that's pretty, I'm gonna hang it on my wall." Or at least that is what I think.

My next project....

Anyway, they first one I made was just some flower I drew, inspired by various Turkish tiles and ceramics we got in on our vacation a while back. I got the idea to frame the embroidery with fabric strips from Anna Maria Horner's book, "Anna Maria's Needlework Notebook." You will see the same thing in a project that I did from her book. Anyway, I like this one, but I didn't plan out how to frame it and whatnot before I did it, so that is why the corners of the white part and cut off and different sizes on the top and bottom....

The next project I did is what I was referring to earlier about how you can embroider anything as silly as you want. My husband showed me these funny video clips of an "abridged" version of the kid's cartoon show "Dragonball Z." It is abridged in the sense that it is actually abridged - each episode is shortened, but the voices are also dubbed over to be funnier. Anyway, this embroidery has some of our favorite lines...

Must admit, still don't know exactly what to do with this one.

 And here is my embroidery I copied from the Anna Maria book. I really liked this as she did it, so I didn't really change anything except maybe some colors. A lot of this was done on the 9-hour flight from India to London while watching various crappy movies...perfect plane-time activity!

Yes, I think that purple flower was done during "The Amazing Spiderman," and the blue flower during, "The Perks of Being a Wallflower."