A Cross-Stitched House, Apparently
I've been plugging away at my eBay Diamond Avenue cross stitch for the past couple weeks and I'm
regretting starting in the center like you're supposed to do with cross
stitch. The center house, of course, is the ugliest one of the three. I
should've just done the two outer ones as separate pieces and saved a
hunk of fabric that I could've used for something better. Like a Robocop hand towel, for instance.
Stop laughing.
I'm liking that before all the flowers and bushes and crap are put in it looks like the house has been ravaged by termites. This would've been a good place to say the hell with it and stitch in some giant ants. Or fire. Glorious fire!
House in Shades of Sad Adobe.
Once you get the cartoonish outlines in it's not too bad, though I doubt any real human has ever put that many flowers on a real house on purpose. It's like a 1980s chintz sofa exploded. I'm guessing the owner regretted their tan color scheme and rather than repaint the whole thing they thought flowers would be a cheap fix because that electric blue door just wasn't cutting it.
The other two houses have a lot less floral going on, like the owners weren't quite off their meds like the lunatic in the center. I do like the useless little cupola thing and laugh at the idea that some poor loser has to lug a watering can up to the third floor to water a fucking window box.
Club-foot kitty has six colors. WHY.
Another big WHY is why doesn't this center set of windows have a dark accent thingy like the others? WHY. It upsets my brain. It's one of those things nobody else would notice but I know if I somehow finish this thing and frame it I'll look at it every time I go past and years later I'll completely lose it and rip it from its frame with my teeth.
So I'll change it now and say nothing else about it.
See, it's not in the pattern so I didn't forget it.
I bought Rock, Paper, Scissors, Lizard, Spock a month or so ago and decided to work on that to clear the floral insanity out of my brain for a while, though the large blocks of color are making me tired. As you can see by the giant catdog paw, Grady knows Paper disproves Spock.
Away We Ride mocks me. I have all the stuff for it, fancy hand-dyed floss I said I wasn't going to buy and a piece of actual linen, but the more I read about stitching on linen the more intimidated I am. You can't use a hoop because that'll mess up the weave and it doesn't have holes like Aida cloth does so you have to pay attention rather than use my method of jamming the needle in willy-nilly and hoping it looks right. I'll have to count THREADS for fuck's sake.
I'll also have to build a frame for it since I've run through all my largish old-timey thrift store frames. Lowe's has that fancy wood edging I've used for frames; you just have to glue a strip of thin lathe on the back so there's a slot for the glass, then cut the pieces out of that. The Victorian house project will just go in an 80s brass frame I've had for a while, since that's what it would've ended up in way back 30 years ago. Everything wound up in one of those things.
Did I mention way back then I worked in a custom frame shop? That's how I know everything wound up in either a shiny brass or shiny chrome frame, with a mat painstakingly matched to whatever fugly thing the customer dragged in. The 80s were so damn matchy-matchy, despite the wrongheaded notion that the whole decade was haphazardly thrown together by Cyndi Lauper on acid.
Anyhow, we had wood in stock but hardly used it unless somebody brought in an antique Audobon print which was, like, never. It was usually a pair of those Robert Furber prints that everybody that wasn't doing Southwest had in the 80s (I recently bought a pair at the thrift store for the frames), or some boring art museum poster you bought to let your parents know that you'd grown past that Duran Duran poster you had over the sofa.
Everything looks better in a crappy 45-cent thrift store frame.
