thegiddystitcher

Ok I missed WIP Wednesday but honestly my week is just an absolute mess of days running into each other so that's no surprise.

Here's my main WIP for this week, as you can see I'm somewhat leaning into the recent pixel-art-style design urge. I'm also leaning into my preference for doing half stitches first and then completing them later, even though it's kind of ugly in the progress photos.

It'll just make the final piece seem prettier by comparison! At least, that's one theory.

(It's going to be a smol garden scene)

Try it before you dismiss it, that's all I'm saying!

Edit: I have found my people.

Like the stitch says, NO RULES! 🇫🇮

Finished my mysterious little project, as teased last week.

Congrats to @[email protected], @[email protected] and @[email protected] for correctly identifying what would soon become a pair of cutoff shorts, but alas the full context was too niche even for Lemmy nerds to get right.

It is, of course, an homage to this year's fabulous Eurovision entry from Finland, which you can watch here if you have three minutes free and want your life to change forever.

I've also made it a free pattern on the off-chance any other cross stitching Finland nerds are about, although I admit that's unlikely 😄

https://ko-fi.com/s/64fafb4849

Now I just need to figure out which of the multiple Eurovision communities is the right one to crosspost this to...

It’s somehow been three months since @[email protected] and I agreed to take over moderation of this community, and we’ve not really had to do anything other than keep an eye out for reports. It’s not exactly been a taxing job, so firstly thank you stitchers for being so undramatic!

But that all happened while I was still super ill and to be honest most of November and December is like a weird fever dream. So I kind of did not do the one thing I said I’d do at the time: post some prospective community rules.

Basically what I’m thinking is we want to have something written down that we can point to just on the off-chance of misbehaviour, but at the same time we don’t need anything draconian or super specific while we’re so small.

Since I’ve already been through this process with [email protected] and there are even quite a lot of people here who are in there too, I think it makes sense to maybe start off with similar rules to the ones the knitters agreed and then diverge if we need to.

Main concerns over there were:

• encouraging people to add pattern info to their posts and
• making sure we have a rule in place to allow removal of ads

On that second point, it was generally agreed that active members of the community should be free to advertise their shops and products in context, but a complete stranger barging in to post a straight-up ad and then leave should be removed. Basically kind of vibe-based, depending on if you look like a spammer or not, which works fine for a small community tbh.

I’d love to hear from community members on this. Are you ok just following the template from /c/knitting for now? Is there something more specific to us you’d also like to see included in the official rules? Or do you maybe disagree with one of those two things above and want us to rethink?

Input very much welcome, thank you!

—

And for a bit more of a fun thing, we have a random community banner and icon that I guess the original owner just googled on the day and never thought about again. In /c/knitting I made a banner featuring some recent FOs that had been posted by the most active members, and that was pretty popular.

I’d be happy to knock up something similar for here, but also want to throw it open in case anyone else would like to give banner design a go! Maybe we’ll say if nobody else comes up with something by the end of March I’ll go full collage mode with our FOs, that gives time for a few entries if you fancy it?

We'll also need an icon and I did not make the knitting one so am officially looking for ideas of what we could use. Actual images, vague concepts, all assistance welcome!

Thank you for bearing with this wall of text. Now get back to stitching!

I've been happily posting away here on two accounts since just before the Great Migration, and have no problem being openly a woman on the internet. Up to and including correcting people who assume I'm a guy, and even occasionally acknowledging the existence of periods.

Which, honestly that was a bad tactic back on Reddit, my inbox was a nightmare. But here it's gone much better, so thank you to anyone who ever received one of my corrections with good grace!

It's also brought quite a few DMs my way from other women who try to stay more anonymous with their posts, a choice I can completely understand.

So today on International Women's Day I just want to wave hello to the other women out there, even if you don't want to break cover and wave back. Anonymous or not, cis or trans, I see you out there and you're killing it.

This may break the community rule on encouraging discussion, if nobody wants to out themselves to say hello back. So I guess I should also ask a question.

Um...anyone else using it as an excuse to treat themselves today? I've given myself the day (mostly) off work and am doing some fun gamedev all afternoon instead, then we're planning a takeaway tonight. Easily pleased, perhaps, but sounds good to me 😄

I'm going with no. No you can't.

But it's going to be a very quick stitch so watch this space for my next stupid niche FO 😅

Finished this one up last week, it's actually designed by myself as I've been trying to learn a bit more about pixel art and specifically working in isometric. It definitely could've done with being darker under the bench but whatever! Proud of it anyway.

Husband is obsessed with pixel art as a medium and he thinks this is just about the coolest project ever, so it can go on display in his office where I don't have to look at that glaring lack of bench shadow 😄

Ok it's not the most exciting stitchy mail in the world, but I don't get to afford things in bulk very often and that's quite a big wallop of plain white aida that'll probably last me at least a year!

Since I needed to order this anyway, I also took the chance to grab the last few colours needed for Errol. Just have to get them on floss drops and I'll be all set! But this brings me to my question...

Our local craft shop sells their skeins for £1.40 ($1.77 per single skein for the US folks). It really really adds up.

I used to buy all my floss online from https://www.enchanted-needle.co.uk which for a long time sold them at £0.69 (nice) and that obviously made a huge difference.

Unfortunately nowadays their pricing has gone up to £0.99 in line with the other big online options, which is still a lot better than £1.40, but when you take postage into account it's no longer really saving much if anything on small orders.

So, after all that rambling, my question is where are other UK stitchers getting your floss? Is there a trick to finding it at the old prices? Or are we just all completely out of luck?

If you will insist on all making separate threads for your projects, at least get weird with it 😄

For once I actually got some stitching time this weekend! Treated myself to some of the missing floss for Errol as a reward for making it through multiple dentist trips, and so this looks pretty much the same as last time I posted him here but in reality there's about 300 stitches of filled-in gaps that were dotted around his torso and tail!

Not the most satisfying progress but it's all gotta be done sometime.

Letting myself work on his lil claws now as a hopefully quick win. I'm maybe 40% of the way through the actual stitching (his head is massive) and already starting to dread all the backstitch 😅

Full disclosure before I say anything else, I’m asking this out of personal curiosity and a desire to help friends out but also because I plan on making a video about it so yes it’s kind of a research question too.

Ok. So personally I use Pattern Keeper, and it’s been great. But I find myself wondering what other apps have popped up in the couple of years since I first discovered PK. The other day someone tagged me in a Mastodon question about alternatives, and then a similar convo coincidentally broke out on Discord too, so clearly other people are asking the same question.

Now, I know about a few apps already. Markup R-XP has a devoted following. CrossStitchSaga I apparently need to try because I hear it supports backstitch. And resident app developer @[email protected] posts here regularly with updates on their new contender.

But I thought I’d cast a wider net and see what everyone else is using.

Do you use one of the ones I listed? Do you use another specialised cross stitch app? Do you use something that was originally designed for a totally different purpose but turns out to work great for stitching? Or do you prefer to keep things analog and mark off printed patterns with a pen?

Would love to hear what you like and dislike about your current solution, and I’m hoping to get to test a load of them out and do a proper comparison of them all.

I promise to do a writeup of the conclusions here too so it’s not just stuck in video form!

It was 24 Hours of Cross Stitch again this weekend and one of my 2024 craft goals was to take part in more stuff like that. So I cleared the calendar and went for it!

We ended up with a few people in my Discord doing it, and a few people on Mastodon threatening to but not quite getting there. Still, maybe next time lol.

Normally I regret joining this challenge by the Friday night but honestly this time it flew by. Possibly because I had to stay up until 4am Sunday morning anyway to watch the Packers get knocked out of the playoffs, so there was a lot of extra stitching time!

Really happy with progress here especially since Errol was the real victim of me getting so sick for the last bit of 2023. This is more like it!

p.s. @[email protected] for reference this is 2 over 2 on 36ct.

p.p.s 19-21st April next, for anyone thinking of giving it a whirl ;)

Not even a knockoff or anything, an actual Lowery! Like the real fancy stitchers have! 😮

Pretty sure you're not supposed to clamp things in at an angle like this, but on the other hand I can't use it sideways until I save up for the extension bar (or more likely fashion something that makes the whole thing a lot less fancy all of a sudden). But for now, this works fine 😁

Will do a proper review at some point, right now I'm mostly just still excited to own one lol.

(This post shamelessly duplicated from Mastodon because cross-posting is temporarily broken)