Look Ma, I can be patient.

[nanila]

Or at least, I can focus my rage down to a tiny point and stab a piece of cloth a thousand times.



I'm happy to be finished with those cream-coloured stitches, apart from a few solos. I've started on the figures. The back-stitching feels like it may actually be in view, instead of a distant dream!

Comments

[pbristow]

[GRIN]

I have a friend who now does on-line virtual cross-point stitching, partly because physical disability issues make doing the real thing unwise in various ways. She completes some absolutely amazing patterns, and also some really dull ones, and all sorts in between. Part of the challenge, apparently, is being able to guess which patterns will turn out to be beautiful when all the stitches are finally in place.

Myself: As a teenager, inspired by what I saw a couple of my friends (they were sisters) doing, I created a cross-stitch design of a Dalek against a rocky landscape. I actually completed stitching about half of the Dalek itself, and never got on to the background. I *think* I still have that unfinished cross-stitch semi-carefully preserved in some plastic tub or other, in amongst the files and folders and reports and notebooks from my school days.

At the time, the idea of building up an image from tiny stitches on a matrix of hessian had obvious parallels with how I'd learned (back as a 7-year-old) images were being beamed back to Earth from space, as a long series of numbers that all had to be slotted into the right squares on a grid, and rendered as levels of brightness, or possibly even as *colours*...

I'd failed in my attempts, as a seven year old, to turn a list of numbers into a picture of the surface of Venus. (I didn't understand about binary numbers: I thought you just had to fill in a black square for a 1, and leave a white square for a zero!). Ten years on, having learned how to count in binary on my fingers all the way up to 1023 (which I practiced how to do faster and faster during some *really* boring sermons!), I thought *maybe* I could get it right at last, and stitch the surface of Venus permanently into a kneeler for the local Anglican church! But first, I had to practice, by doing my "quicker and easier" Dalek picture... =:o}

[PATS YOUNGER SELF FONDLY ON THE HEAD]

[nanila]

A Dalek sounds like a great subject for a cross stitch. Must find a good pattern!

[pbristow]

[READS YOUR TEXT AGAIN]

OMG *WHAT*?!? You started with the cream stitches?!? =8oO

What kind of sadist made you do that? What the hell were your eyes and rest-of-brain supposed to latch onto for orientation, while you were doing that?!? =:oo

[SHUDDERS]

[TAKES A DEEP SWIG OF (SENSIBLY PRE-DILUTED) VODKA TO CALM NERVES]

[nanila]

If I hadn't started with them, I doubt I'd have finished! The rest of this is going to be a lot more fun.

[silveradept]

Congratulations on your focused rage producing results.

[nanila]

Thank you.