I'm on the internet!

My workplace is doing a series of human-interest videos about employees and our hobbies. They featured me and my cross stitch obsession!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlNXT-yQHC8

I'm impressed they managed to make a video of me where I could stand watching the rough cuts. :D

On the other hand, this reminds me that I have an Instagram and I should post about 1000000000 things to it. Or any things, honestly.

On the other other hand, wow my craft room is a mess.

On the fourth hand (rapidly running out of hands), my crafting table is now clear because of this, so yay!

Reading, watching, stitching

Prefacing the reading and watching with "I don't know if it's the piece or if it's me, but..."

I finished the third Lady Astronaut book. The ending was reasonably satisfying. The first 10% I was very grumpy that she switched narrators from the first 2 books, to a character who I don't even like that much. The middle 80% I was basically waiting for something, ANYTHING, good to happen to these people. A lot of the events were just a little too on-the-nose with real life to be at all enjoyable. Oh well. I persevered! I'm glad I've read it, but I'm now in the mood for something lighter.

We've started watching season 4 of Stranger Things. 3 episodes in, it's not really doing much for me. There's nothing really novel going on, and the bits where The Kids Are In High School Now And Are Trying To Fit In are fucking excruciating. If Stuart wants to keep watching it I'll play along, but I'm finding it rather grim and joyless.

On the joyful and not-grim side of the aisle...

Stitching! Having finished Peeking Cats, my main criteria for what to do next were "smaller" and "absolutely no backstitch". Also, fuck fractionals on Aida.

I've started the third piece in a set, "Art Nouveau Seasons" by Sheila Hudson from the Christmas 2003 issue of Cross Stitcher magazine (UK). I've already done Winter and Summer and am now doing Spring. It's daffodils, and although I don't really care for yellow at all, I thought I'd get it out of the way so I can reward myself with Autumn which is grapes and thus has Many Purples in it. It's very soothing to be working on something blocky and less fiddly. I am not pleased with all of her color choices, as some of them are so close together as to be nearly indistinguishable, but the results are so pretty it's hard to argue. As a bonus, this gave me something simple to record some footage of. (It's surprisingly hard to video yourself cross stitching. Who knew?)

I'm sad that I didn't save more of Sheila Hudson's patterns. She passed away some years ago and I don't think her works have ever been collected and published. I have this set and a really nifty repeating-motif Oriental dragon in magenta and gold shades that I might do someday.

Sorry I'm so bad about posting photos here. I'll see what I can do.