Enemy of Entropy

Graphics. Gah!

4 May 2008, 10:36 am. 1 Comment. Filed under Art, Geekery, Needlework.

There are times when being graphic-​​impaired really does annoy me.

I’m finally mov­ing for­ward with port­ing the Heart­song Hand­i­crafts site to Word­Press. It shouldn’t be a big deal. I’ve done the same many times before with other sites.

Unfor­tu­nately, I don’t have a logo. I mean, I have a sim­ple logo, but it isn’t very good. It doesn’t sing, that’s for sure. I just want a nice, sim­ple logo that isn’t ter­ri­bly busy, but that doesn’t look (like the first attempt) as if I made it from clip-​​art and stan­dard fonts. My utter and com­plete lack of draw­ing abil­ity is a seri­ous hand­i­cap in this endeavor.

I did sorta cus­tomize a WP theme to match the crappy logo, but that part is easy. The harder part is hav­ing some­thing to give the site visual inter­est, and that doesn’t exist right now.

On the other hand, the cross-​​stitch pat­terns them­selves involve graph­ics, so I don’t want things to get too busy. It’s a bal­anc­ing act.

I may have to throw myself on Katie’s mercy, or some­thing. She’s pretty busy, though, and prefers to draw what­ever she feels like draw­ing rather than cre­at­ing some­thing to suit a par­tic­u­lar theme.

SBQ: Essential Needlework Gear

3 April 2008, 6:03 pm. 1 Comment. Filed under Needlework, SBQ.

Yay! Another Stitch­ing Blog­gers’ Question:

What items do you con­sider essen­tial to your needle­work that you keep
in your stitch­ing bag

The pat­tern, fab­ric and ring of floss cards for my cur­rent project, the scroll bars or QSnaps or hoop or what­ever I’m using (I sel­dom stitch in hand), and a long sil­ver chain on which I wear my scis­sors and nee­dle case. If I’m work­ing with metallics, I also keep — whoops, what’s the name of it? That tiny blue cube of stuff that makes metallics so much more man­age­able? I’m not using metallics at the moment, so there’s none in my bag, but I guess I should go look up the name of it.

I did keep a seam rip­per in the bag, but I don’t have a safe case for my cur­rent rip­per, so I’m afraid to do that.

Lately, I also keep a small magnifier/​light that hangs around my neck in the bag. It doesn’t work so well, though, so I should prob­a­bly just take it out.

I really need to replace my bag. It’s falling apart, and the zip­per is stub­born. It’s been incred­i­bly good for a free­bie bag, though! It lasted about ten years.

I’ve lusted after a nice stand­ing or lap frame for years — one of the good, sturdy ones, with attach­ments for a lamp and a mag­ni­fier and chart holder and a place to put your fibers and such. Some even come with cup hold­ers! The nice ones are trés expen­sive, though. I don’t want to bother with the flimsy ones, as I think they’d be more frus­trat­ing than helpful.

Stitching Notes

29 June 2006, 1:38 pm. 1 Comment. Filed under Needlework, SBQ.

First, I’ll answer this week’s SBQ:

What do you do with your charts once you’ve stitched them? Do you keep them or dis­pose of them? If you keep them, do you orga­nize them in a way that is dif­fer­ent from the way you keep your unstitched charts?

I keep them. ALL of them. In fact, Sam has pointed out that col­lect­ing charts should be con­sid­ered a hobby in and of itself, sep­a­rate from the actual stitch­ing. If I could dis­play my lovely pat­terns some­how, I would.

Next, I must Squee! For I’ve been asked for an orig­i­nal cross-​​stitch design for a book that’ll be pub­lished this com­ing year. I’m so tick­led! I’m not telling more than that, but it’s all pro­fes­sional and everything.

And finally, that was the impe­tus for another change. I’ll announce it in the next week. It’s a sur­prise for now :-)

 

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