Massive(ly late) Christmas gift post

So this post is late. I mean really late, Like, these are Christmas presents in here, late. I was going to stagger all of this awesome out over several posts, but my habits have been so lax lately, I figured it was best to get them all out in one go. So here it is: the Massive(ly late) Christmas gift post.

First up, my brother’s Christmas present. He is quite a prosaic lad; what he wanted was $20 to buy a Steam game. What he got was $20 and a cross-stitched Portal sign:

This untruthful cake was only part of a whole incredible series of Portal warning signs by the Crafty Bikyclist, and they are all available as free patterns. Highly recommended for the geek in your life.

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For my Dad’s Christmas present, I went with a pattern I had bought some months previously. When I was hunting for patterns to make his birthday platypus, I found Planet June’s Sea Otter – way too adorable to resist!

I remembered (from childhood trips to the zoo) that Dad was fond of the cuteness of otters, so I crocheted this one, complete with clam-shell accessory. He now sits atop the TV, adorning it with his adorability.

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The last gift in the list was somewhat nerve-wracking – I wanted to cross-stitch a Christmas present for my boyfriend’s mum, who I was meeting for the first time. (Spoiler: We traveled over to visit in January, I met her and she is rad. We high-fived over cooking, craft and trashy novels.)

I planned the design concept very carefully – I didn’t want to stitch something offensive, but nor did I want to make something staid and boring. In the end, I decided on an old-school pattern from one of my ex-library books; I picked a black bird because I knew she loved animals, and because I wanted to put a twist in the whole “Nevermore” trope. The resulting cross-stitch was somewhat more upbeat than Poe:

I was very relieved when the pattern fit so neatly into this frame; I checked the size before starting, but didn’t take into account the curlicues of the leaves. Thankfully, it all worked out – the stitched leaves slotting neatly into the spaces left by the brass foliage.

As a gift, it was very successful – it turns out blackbirds are one of her favourites. When we left, it was on display next to her bird cage, perhaps to encourage the budgie to similar heights of ‘Awesome!’.

 

This is the giant post of boyfriend craft

Over the last year or so, I have been making various pieces of crafty awesome for my boyfriend (also awesome). But I have been exceptionally lax in blogging these creations. So, in an extremely tardy fashion, here are some of the geeky boyfriend crafts I have made over the last year:

Birthday! A quote from his favorite Terry Pratchett character, Sam Vimes, from the book Night Watch – the flowers at the bottom are lilac blossoms, which are seriously plot-relevant in the book.

Also, a cross-stitched triceratops birthday card! The triceratops is from from Makoto’s Cross-Stitch Super Collection, which has fantastic mini-designs.

Christmas! Cthulu cross-stitch from Needlenoodles, and Zombie Vampire from Zombie Felties. We had at the time been playing a lot of Arkham Horror; on reflection, that fed heavily into my crafty psyche. Plus, cutesy Lovecraftian nightmares and steampunk-style zombie vampires are just cool, y’know?

Valentines Day: a heart, of course! I stitched this ages ago, but could not pass it over as a Valentines gift: it just struck the right note between geeky and romantic.

Anniversary! A Weighted Companion Cube from Nerdigurumi (and also, well, Portal). Made after we began cohabiting, and therefore crocheted in secrecy, at odd times and in weird places. Stitched with love and weighted with glass beads, your Weighted Companion Cube will never threaten to stab you.

Aaaaaand birthday again! A hand-embroidered felt d20, of my own devising! Again stitched as a covert operation. The project began as a crocheted d20, but in the end, felt was a much more manageable medium, especially with that much embroidery and sewing-up. While it’s not entirely game-legal, it does roll surprisingly true!

 Also, I made a Jaffa marble cake with dark chocolate ganache. It was delicious!

Needless to say, we are well suited in our geeky tastes.

 

Swapsies!

The theme for the latest Phat Quarter swap was “It’s not the end of the world”. My piece has landed safely in America, so without further ado, I present my take on the theme:

The text is, of course, from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and the border is from an early 20th century DMC pattern book. Going by my limited understanding of German, the space in the centre was originally designed for a memorial – however, I think the timeless words of Douglas Adams are much more important to remember!

I received an awesome piece myself, from jojobooster – a very cool twitter-feed take on the theme:

It was a most impressive parcel to receive in the mail!

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In other news, I am aware that I’ve been neglecting this blog over the past few months; I plead the turmoil of moving house and consecutive illnesses which have knocked me flat. I have a massive backlog of stuff I need to post, which I’ll hopefully be plowing through over the next month or so. Stay tuned for some black (books) humour, crazy awesome yarnbombing, super cute amigurumi, random book art, and even more Christmas craft!

 

Giving the gift of creepy crafts

Two of the guys in my D&D campaign had birthdays recently; creepy gifts were clearly the order of the day.

One gift was made at extremely short notice – Facebook informed me that it was his birthday at about 3pm, and I had this zombie undertaker whipped up by about 4:30pm. Whatever else you say about Zombie Felties, those little critters are goddamned swift to make.

I was a little more organised for the other gift. The goal was to crochet an extremely creepy blue-grey monkey;  the recipient’s character in our D&D campiagn owns just such a monkey. It has a complex backstory and answers to the name of Patrick. After may hours of solid crochet work and some consultation with the Dungeon Master, it was decided that this is Patrick:

Patrick was made from PlanetJune’s fuzzy monkey pattern, with a lot of the cute exchanged for extreme creepiness. The limbs and tail are fully wired and poseable, and the muzzle has handcrafted metal teeth (another plot point from the D&D campaign). Patrick can now be found assulting random stuffed dolls and statuettes all over his new owner’s house.

 

A mailbox full of awesome – part two

As I was assembling my last post, I suddenly realised that I had received a whole bunch of awesome swap pieces that I hadn’t blogged yet. (Pretty much the only piece I had posted was this shiatsu chart by feminizzle.)

I therefore present part two of this swap showcase, starting with the Phat Quarter Comic Swap, back in March 2010. I embroidered xkcd for shaebay, and received this piece from taff1973:

It’s a beautifully rendered piece of cyanide and happiness, and it was hanging in my office pretty much the whole time I had an office.

Back in October 2010, the swap theme was “Oh! The Horror!”, resulting in a gallery of awesome embroidered horror mash-ups. I made bad zombie puns for AKAwhiteknuckles, and received this from The Relaxolotl:

At the very beginning of the swap, she asked me how I felt about obscure Shakespeare plays. My response: Hells Yes! And thus I received this pun-based stitchery, inspired by Shakespeare’s Two Noble Kinsmen. But that’s not the cool bit. This is the cool bit:

Switch off the lights, and the punchline is revealed: glow-in-the-dark, skeletal Chernobyl Kinsmen. Really, what more could a girl ask for?

 

Welcome to Hogwarts

I am so excited to share the piece I made for this month’s Phat Quarter Swap! The theme was books, and my swap partner is a huge Harry Potter fan, so making this piece was a bit of a no brainer. I’ve always liked a challenge!

The text is pulled directly from the first Harry Potter book – it’s a Hogwarts Acceptance letter, customised for my swap partner. It’s stitched on 22 count fabric, which I stretched across an embroidery frame to get the right tension.

The letterhead is cross-stitched in metallic copper thread; the font is from an antique alphabet sampler. Dumbledore’s credentials are stitched in a gold silk thread, and the rest of the letter is just a green DMC. The bulk of the text is freehanded – I just decided on the slope of the letters, then ‘wrote’ until I hit the edge of the page. The fact that it turned out exactly A4 is more a matter of luck than of planning! Finally, the piece is mounted on an A4 sheet of stiffened, off-white felt – I just pressed the egdes into a hem, and glues it onto the reverse of the felt.

I am super pleased with the result – and my swap partner is too!

 

My friends get the weirdest birthday presents

Two of my friends had a joint birthday this weekend, and I wanted to craft something disturbing for each of them.

I asked one what she would like me to crochet for her birthday. Her reply? An ubervamp. Since we had, in fact, spent the previous weekend singing along to the Buffy musical episode, Once More With Feeling (which we both know by heart), all was understood, and away I went.

Visual references on the internet proved to be inadequate, so I was compelled to rewatch Buffy season 7. For, you know, the ubervamp research. Clearly.

This disturbingly adorable Turok-han is the result:

Adapted from the Nosferatu pattern in Creepy Cute Crochet, this misshapen, glistening-fanged, red-eyed monstrosity was happily received into its new home, where it now lurks on top of a Buffy the Vampire Slayer Collector’s Edition Box Set.

My other friend was less immediately decisive, so I decided for her. After all, what better gift for a cat person than a Zombie Kitty?

This extremely cute undead kitty is from the book Zombie Felties, a nifty collection including zombiefied puppies, ducks and bunnies.

It’s a good thing I have weird friends, otherwise they might look at me funny when they unwrapped their gifts…

 

My Little Death Ray Pony

Last week, I was extremely excited to see that the very excellent webcomic, Girls With Slingshots, featured a strip about the awesomeness of cross-stitch. Specifically, it mentioned a Cross-Stitched Death Pony with Laser Beam Eyes. I could not remember ever seeing such a thing, and decided that this fact needed to be swiftly rectified.

I immediately went scavenging for pony patterns to mutilate; eventually, I reverse-engineered a pattern from a cute My Little Pony longstitch. A couple of days later, et voila!

Cross-Stitched Death Pony with Laser Beam Eyes (with bonus Burning Stick-Figure)

“DEATH RAY PONIES ARE SO CUTE!”