Itty bitties

Azrael has turned into a walking timebomb for anyone with allergies at the moment. He’s a longhaired cat and therefore most likely to cause problems for anyone allergic to cats. If that wasn’t enough, he really loves frolicking in the field at the moment. The problem is that we haven’t mowed it. So it’s full of hip-to-chest high grasses all covered in seeds. So he comes in in all his longhaired glory and his fur is liberally infested with grass seed. If someone who was allergic to cats and suffered from hayfever were to so much as look at him at the moment they’d probably spontaneously combust on the spot.

Amanda’s hedgehog is going too slowly. I had the house to myself yesterday evening as Wookie was out on a works night out boozing, and then stayed at one of the guys houses for the night, and yet I still only managed an hour and a half’s stitching. I’m out tonight and we’re both out most of Saturday so I think Sunday will be spent firmly ensconced in front of the telly, stitching in hand.

As just mentioned, I’m out tonight on my own works do. It’s actually to celebrate the end and successful implementation of the project I was working on with my old team in Brum. So I’ll be driving over there tonight for some Teppan-yaki *mmm* and I’ll get to see everyone again. I haven’t seen most of them since last October so I’ve got some catching up to do. In fact yesterday I found out that one of the other women is expecting, has been for ages and is due to go on maternity leave soon and none of them thought to tell me, buggers.

One of my stitching friends has recently started her own blog and is currently struggling with templates and the joys of CSS and HTML. I’ve offered my services to help her get redesigned using her existing template as a starting point. My CSS is nowhere near good enough to write a template from scratch, but I have me a book and I’m on my way to learning. Who knows I may be asking Gemmak and Lisa for a job soon.

I’m going to go for it with the part time working. Of course now all I have to do is clear it with my boss and get the wheels in motion, they can still say that I can’t do it and then all the agonising will have been in vain. I’m supposed to be having a review with him this week (ahahahaha, no but seriously) so I’ll bring it up then.

Finally there’s this weeks SBQ:

Are there any types of designs that you won’t stitch?

Off the top of my head, I can’t think of any. Some people have mentioned specific designers or themes, such as heavily religious designs for a religion that they don’t follow. I don’t really have a problem, if I like a design I’ll stitch it. Wookie commented on my Angel of the Sea that it had a very ‘Madonna and child’ look about it, because the baby that she is holding looks like he has a halo. That fact hadn’t even registered with me, I had simply seen a lovely design that I wanted to stitch.

On the whole I don’t go mad for designs that are simply pieces of art converted into cross stitch. They are a lot of work because it’s solid stitching, they tend to be quite large and frankly if I wanted to hang the picture on my wall I’d get a print. That said I have recently bought a couple of HAED charts, which are certainly a better quality of conversion than the norm and the designs I’ve chosen, Aries and Winter Moon are ones that lend themselves to being stitched on hand-dyed fabrics so that the background can be left unstitched.