November 03 X-Stitch Diary

27th November 03

After my sojourn in London, this week has been back to normal life and stitching.

I finished the Bambi Cover kit that I have been working on from time to time as my "purse project", and I've since replaced this in my purse with some Christmas cards. I really need to start concentrating on some more of these if I want to get them done by Christmas, after all, December is almost upon us, and so far I've only bought two chrissie presents..... oh no....

After being really good and finishing off two UFO's recently, I rewarded myself by starting two new projects.

I've been itching to start the Dimensions, Charles Wysocki design "Too Pooped" since June this year. I even took the kit with me to Spain, but never got around to even looking at it. Anyway, I started stitching him last week and so far I've made a little progress (13.5 hours) on him. When I opened the thread pack and started sorting out all the threads, I was slightly disappointed as they did seem to be a bit dim and dismal, but after I started stitching the cat's rear end, I was nicely suprised at how much the tabby colouring is standing out.

I caught up this week with CSOIIS's (Cross Stitch Obsession II Yahoogroup) second Mystery Stitch-a-long. The organiser is TDee, and even though were only on week 2, Jane has already guessed the pattern. Apparently she had this chart in her "To Do" stash, so matching it up was relatively simple. Fortunately, the subject of the design remains a mystery for the rest of us which is a great incentive to keep stitching on it.

Last week the 435 brown stitches were released, this week all the 368 pistachio green ones. It seems to have two green buttons somewhere in the design, so god knows what it is. The green square pattern in all four corners makes me also think that the design is surrounded by a border.

Roll on Saturday so I can get the next part of the SAL.

19th November 03

I went to London on Wednesday this week (only just avoiding all the anti-Bush protest marches by one day) to meet up with our fellow group
member, Piwi from Holland who is in the UK for a few days and to attend the Lord of the Rings Exhibition at the Science Museum in London.

I can say that I highly recommend attending the Exhibition which consists lots of the costumes worn in the films by the characters like Aragorn,
Frodo, Gandalf, Arwen and Galadriel (including that beautiful white beaded dress that the character wore during the magic mirror scene with Frodo) and also a display of their weapons, crowns, rings, The One Ring, and discarded prosthetic hobbit feet and elvish ears.

Each display for the individual characters and species was usually accompanied by it's own interactive DVD screen where you could view various
behind the scenes shots, the making of documentaries and interviews by Peter Jackson and Co. Some of these I have seen previously on the extended version of Fellowship of the Ring.

Two of these mini-featurettes which I hadn't seen before made both of us laugh.

Apparently they were rather short of horses and their male owners for scenes involving the shooting of the Riders of Rohan, so a lot of those Horsemen were infact "bearded" ladies. The other amusing featurette was a glimpse at how the large orc army approaching Helm's Deep and the battle scenes were filmed. A lot of the army was simply CGI characters, given a little AI to pit their own battles in a computer simulation of a real battle scene. In some of the early WIPs the AI characters chose to run away from the battlefield rather than fight. And who can blame them, given the odds? <g>

Interestingly enough, the model of Isengard had been removed from the display for re-shooting of key scenes for Return of the King, but with less
than a month now to go until the film officially opens one has to wonder if they are cutting it a bit fine.

No cameras were permitted in the Exhibition and any mobile phones also had to be turned off (as many new models now have cameras in them). You could, however have your picture taken with a friend using a forced perspective techinique, making one of you look like a hobbit, which we did.

In fact, the Museum were seemingly forced at one point to relax their rules regarding what could and what could not be taken into the exhibition.
Originally, according to signs on the wall; there were to be no bags, no phones, no cameras of any kind allowed in, with the facility to leave your possessions in the basement cloakroom for the princely sum of £1 per item.

Now, this cloakroom facility has the standard disclaimer "any possessions left here is at the owner's own risk", so, in one interpretation they were basically saying, "leave your expensive cameras, phones and handbags with us, but we won't guarantee to give them back". No wonder they were forced to change their policy.... to have been a fly on the wall and hear all those arguments during the first few days of the exhibition would have been very interesting.

After leaving the LOTR Exhibition and after a trip to the shop and a well needed sit-down after spending two hours on our feet in the LOTR exhibit, Piwi and I walked around some of the other attractions in the museum, including a mockup of the Apollo 11 lander, the Martian Viking Probe, Robert Stevenson's Rocket and one of the world's first computers.

We then left the museum and went to Covent Garden to grab a bite to eat, and a cocktail or two before going home.

18th November 03

Continuing the quest to finish my UFOs: I got around to finally finishing the border on my Cats in the Hats RR, sewing on the whiskers (which my mother didn't do as she hates backstitch), and I bought some little charms and gems to attach to the cat's collars. They were not the ones called for in the pattern itself, which were Mill Hill Charms and Treasures, one of these cost about £5 by itself. Instead, I went to a local needlework shop and had a rummage through their buttons and beads. I bought a little packet of heart shaped gems and a little packet of garden charms. Some of these garden charms are unspeakably cute, with little miniture garden tools, flowers and a snail. I used a four-leaf clover for Wishbone's collar and a butterfly for Daffodil's collar. The other two cats are wearing gems.This piece of material is currently having a frame made for it by my cousin.

Sean was away this past weekend, so I availed myself of the opportunity to crack on with some stitching with no interruptions. After finishing the Reindeer Christmas Decorations which I started working on for last Christmas on Thursday (I'll have to take a picture of these, but first I need to mount them on some green felt and attach a hanging cord), I was of a mind set to finish some more of my UFOs so I picked up the MSAL Teddy Bear holding the cup of tea which I started in June. I completed this yesterday morning. This chart is free to download on the DMC Website it is called "After Dinner".

I've also nearly finished the Bambi Cover Kit which is my Purse Project at the moment. I took this picture yesterday afternoon, but since then I've completed the butterfly and started work on the backstitch.

After being so good and finishing off those UFOs I rewarded myself yesterday by starting the "Too Pooped" Dimensions kit, designed by Charles Wysocki.

10th November 03

Comical Cat is finally done. He took a lot longer than I thought he would, the background in particular seemed to take ages to stitch up and it was all boring plain single crosses towards the end too.

Although I confess that I have been somewhat distracted from actually stitching by the creation of the new group last weekend. Making sure UKCSF got off to a running start has been quite time consuming.

Last week my Aunt, myself and my mother (reluctantly... she has 15!!!), made a list of all our wips and UFOs. We agreed to prioritise them and finish them off. My Aunt has the least UFOs, she is really good at finishing things off once she starts them. My two assigned UFOs were the Cats in the Hats RR - which I've now done (all it needs is framing, I've even bought some little gems to attach to the collars) and the Reindeer Xmas Decorations which I didn't finish off in time last Christmas. Now that Comical Cat is out of the way I will be stitching on these later on tonight.

I've also made quite a bit of progress on my Bambi Cover Kit which is my purse project for the moment.

When we listed our UFOs, my Aunt dug this kit out from the bottom of her sewing box as one of her UFOs. She had had trouble with it, so put it to one side. I started my copy of this kit in the hope that in stitching it myself, I could see where she went wrong. Last Thursday I found the error, and unpicked quite a bit of Bambi's ears on my Aunt's kit. Now she can start him off again error-free.

3rd November 03

I've done more work on Comical Cat, he's nearly complete, just a little of the background and the backstitching to go.

Since previously posting on here last month, I've finished two Christmas Cards:

A Robin for my mother
A Bunny for Karen

These two little mouseloft kits stitched up remarkably fast. As for the bunny one, I did that in two hours while I was supposed to be at work. But as the school's on half-term this and last week, there's very little work that needs to be done so we just sat and chatted. Or my colleagues chatted, I listened, and stitched. I was amazed that I got it finished from beginning till end.

There was a nasty occurence on the stitching groups yesterday.

Quite a few members of UKXSF have been having problems since the group moved (rather hastily in my opinion), to MSN groups. The group owners themselves have admitted that problems existed and wanted feedback from group members on what their feelings about MSN were. On the 1st Nov, they posted a message threatening to close the group if the volume of messages posted didn't pick up.

Anyway, that little problem aside, which I was unaware of at the time (due to switching to digest mode because I just couldn't hack MSN), I decided to recreate the old group that originally resided on Yahoo, primarily for the members who were having problems with MSN, myself included, to create a workable forum until the problems could be solved or resolved. I invited the MSN managers (Shazie and Jo) to the new group, offering them moderator priviledges; and the next thing I knew I was out of MSN on my ear!!! So much for "helping" people!!

This isn't the first time that people have been expelled from that group for no reason, with no discussion or warnings due to the over-zealous management. I think the only time I would act in such a way myself would be in the case of spammers.... because let's face it, spammers deserve all they get.

I think that this may be the beginning of the end for UKXSF as it is now clearly being run by a dictatorship who want control over what you say, when you say it, and it seems who you are affiliated with too. No wonder members are deserting them in droves....

Anyway, so it seems I am now a owner/moderator of my own new stitching group:

Click to subscribe to ukcsf

So who wants to join?

lol - You've got to laugh.... the life and times of the online stitching groups.... better than a soap opera any day.

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