Embroidery Round-Up

I think I know why people like doing embroidery: It's hella fast. I mean, it CAN be hella fast, but of course it can also take HELLA FOREVER like the one I'm working on at home right now. But it is possible to take a project from start to finish in about an hour, which is addictively satisfying. Even if you stupidly start the project at 10:30 the night before it's due, such as this card for my friend Patti AKA the Only Person That Reads This Blog:

Patti got a new job and is leaving me here to rot. Best of luck! ;) (I should mention that I got that pattern from Jenny Hart's book Embroidered Effects. Go buy tons of stuff from her.)

One of my metal forum buddies just joined the Air Force, and she put out a plea for "real mail, not fb posts!" so I obliged her and made this card:

(Next time I'll try to get all the green paint out from under my nails.) The embroidery pattern was too big for the card and I didn't feel like jump-starting the scanner, so I had my husband sketch this one because:

1. I didn't want him to see me drawing an F-16 and get jealous since...

2. Drawing F-16s is a boy's job; and

3. I didn't want him staring over my shoulder and critiquing my shitty plane-drawing skills.

So he drew it and I sewed over it. And my friend liked it! I'll probably send her some other plane cards while she's trapped in Basic Training. I'm not sure how much longer that will be.

My neighbor has a nasty habit of baking delicious treats and then bringing them to my house and giving them to me. She really needs to stop doing that. I want a plate of her Oreo truffles on my death bed. Anyhoo, her recent delivery was two red velvet cupcakes. They were both delicious. That's right, I ate them both. Then I made her a card with a cupcake embroidered on it. It was very cute. Too bad I didn't take a photo of it. Sigh.

But I did take plenty of photos of the following. Are you playing the game Draw Something? Of course you are. Everyone is. All of my Scrabble and Words with Friends games completely dried up once that thing hit the market. It was highly addictive at first, but then we all got kind of tired of the same words over and over again, and the obvious fact emerged that you could usually just guess the drawing based on the letters offered before anyone started making any lines. So I got a little bored after a while.

Then my brother-in-law Mike started playing.

Mike is a terrible artist. In addition, he is also the most colorblind person I know. So you can imagine that Draw Something got real interesting real fast when he jumped into the ring. Remember that time you picked the word "greenday" (not on purpose, no one ever picks that one on purpose) and you started by smearing a huge swath of green at the top? Forget that. "Lake" was a blue swath? Forget that too. We're dealing with an entirely different Draw Something game now. I said, "Hey Mike, all your people are orange. You need more colors." He answered, "I wouldn't know what to do with them." HA! Oh yeah, I forgot!! THE STAKES JUST GOT MUCH HIGHER.

In a case of serendipity, the same week Mike joined Draw Something was the same week my husband and I learned how to do screen caps on the iPhone. Which was very close to when I started discovering the Blessing of Embroidery. Behold the result of this confluence of events:

Can you guess what this is? That's right, it's what Mike thinks a poodle looks like. See, I would have guessed that the Jetsons had more than one dog, based on the antennae and weird rings around the body. But no, it's a poodle.

This one might be a little harder:

Hmmm. Gee, it's right on the tip of my tongue. OH WAIT NO IT ISN'T BECAUSE THIS IS WHAT MIKE THINKS IKEA LOOKS LIKE. That's right. IKEA. The furniture store. Now I will admit that I've only been in IKEA twice, and both times it was just to get lingonberry jam for my father-in-law and then haul ass back to the car. So maybe IKEA is some bleak, hellish nightmare filled with giant white dinosaurs, broken tables and yellow meatballs. How would I know? Commercials lie anyway.

To commemorate Mike's eye-opening leap into the Draw Something arena, I decided the only proper tribute would be a satin pillow:

But the poodle was a memorable achievement as well, at least one worthy of some embroidered notecards:

This goes to show that even handicapped freaks have something to offer the rest of us, even if it's just a hearty laugh in their direction. Here's to you, Mike. Keep cranking out the gold!