Yes, that really is the poop emoji … on a postage stamp.

(I’m completely mad for that top typeface).

Future reading – a rare Real Book. Because I really deserve a treat. 

xxx

Sirius – by way of explanation. 

Go buy a copy here!

Bobs and I were chatting today and he mentioned that he’d booked a holiday cabin near Lithgow that would allow them to bring the dog. This was apropos of the spookiness of almost immediately afterward receiving an email from his pet insurer about preparing your dog for travel.

I was more interested in the holiday-cabin-near-Lithgow part of the tale and asked him to back up a bit. 

Me: “Where are you staying?”

Bobs: “Some place, I think the name starts with [redacted].”

Me: “It’s not [redacted] is it?”

Bobs: “That sounds right. It’s near … the name is something-[redacted] in it.”

Me: “[redacted]?”

Bobs: (looks at phone) … “Yes, [redacted] and [redacted]”.

Me (slightly horrified) “ermm … and what dates would you be staying there?”

Bobs: “25th, 26th, 27th”

Me (even more horrified): “and ah … what month is this?”

Bobs: “December”.

Me: “OHTHANKGOD!”

And that’s how I came to learn that Bobs and family will be staying at the same very obscure little holiday location as we’ve booked for my birthday – but exactly a month later.

Film 13 was Dr Strangelove and in 10 words or less:

A smidge (okay, way) too zany, but definitely worth watching.

xxx

And only 20 days to get the final 3 movies in!

My keep cup arrived in the post today – xs size for my recently acquired macchiato habit.

That’s two less disposable cups per day (of the 1 billion a year!) entering the waste steam – well, as long as I remember to take it to the cafe with me!

I don’t think we’ve ever seen NewKitty snuggled in a box**! It was really the day for it – cold, rainy and gloomy. I couldn’t really tell you what I did with the day – oh yes! I spent a couple of hours deaccessioning documents from the filing cabinet, and entered our historic gas, electricity and water usage into a spreadsheet and made some charts (of course) with the data.

And just like that, another weekend is over.

xxx

** BabyKitty’s box – there was a Reckoning when she discovered it occupied 

After a couple of aborted attempts, it was back to the google machine to try and find inspiration. I noticed most of the images I liked were taking me to pinterest, so I dusted off my elderly, never-used account, created a textile arts pinterest board and got lost for a couple of hours.

I responded really well to works made up of many, many tiny repetitive stitches – and I absolutely adored the works of people like Rieko Koga and Christine Mauersberger – so many really beautiful pieces.

You will recall the parameters of my challenge: something with pointy hearts | something for Don.

And after knocking around a bunch of ideas, I asked myself the following:

Would it be totally bonkers to:
+ sew one stitch for each day of our relationship since our first date? YES!
+ or maybe a tiny heart shape for each day of our relationship? YES!
+ and make each year a slightly different colour? YES!
+ and a red heart to mark each anniversary? YES!
+ and a gold heart for our wedding? YES!

Yes – totally Bonkers, but Awesome!

So that’s the project – a tiny heart for each day of our relationship, meandering in a line ending in a red heart for each year.

Pillaged the thread stash for shades of grey and navy

Created a spreadsheet (of course)

Made some checklists (also of course)

And began:

first anniversary

3 years

gold heart for wedding

I’m quite pleased with how it is turning out. Though with only 740 hearts in (of 4,063 @ today) – there’s quite a long way to go! And I imagine it will be quite dense with hearts by the time it is done.

I’m really enjoying the meditative aspect of it – it’s lovely just to sit quietly with an audiobook and stitch away. I’m not intending to rush to completion in the next *gasp* 23 days – it will finish when it finishes.

This week I’ve been incentivising the project team at SML (who are in the middle of some quite awful testing) with a steady supply of mysterious Japanese snacks from the ever-excellent daiso.

I loved embroidery and tapestry as a child and teen, and did quite a bit of counted cross stitch, mostly samplers and such, when the babies were small. I picked this as a 50before50 project because I wanted to see if the enjoyment would still be there.

I didn’t really want to stitch anything cutesy, twee or conventional (yes, I’m rolling my eyes at myself too) and I wanted something that would go with our decor because I was keen to frame the results.

I really loved the insanely, eye-poppingly expensive reproduction kits from the traquair house collection when I first saw them way back in 2011 – the griffin! the leopard! – so fantastic! I dithered about for years and years, putting various kits in a cart and then abandoning the exercise, because couldn’t really justify the expense. When I decided to finally go for it in the name of this project, there were none to be bought anywhere – and even most references to the kits had vanished with them!

So I sat and pondered for a really long while and idly searched for modern embroidery here and there – but nothing really grabbed me. This project threatened to go the way of the model boat.

xxx

While all this pondering was going on a completely and totally unrelated thing happened.

When Don and I first started dating we used google chat a lot to, well, chat. We were very taken with the little animated, almost hand-drawn, heart that appeared when you typed <3 and it became a bit of a thing for us. Then we stopped using chat for many years, initially because it was blocked at SML, but then with smartphones and such we moved onto other things. Pointy hand-drawn hearts were still a thing for us though and periodically I’d stitch hearts on stuff.

The chat window magically re-appeared a couple of months ago and we delighted the nostalgia the re-appearance wrought – and started using it mostly to send hearts back and forth during the day (yes, I am aware at how utterly sickening this is) … then the announcement that google was discontinuing chat! Our hearts! Oh no!

That was when I realised that I could embroider something heart-related for this project, which would also satisfy #50 in making something special for Don.

But what to do?

xxx

First I took a wobbly video of my monitor showing the heart transforming – which is quite impossible to upload, but I’ve had a go here (warning: if it works, it’s giant!).

Then I found and saved the actual heart image making up the animation:

Then I printed out the image in several sizes and stuck one above my desk:

It took a long while to work out how this was going to manifest itself – and to find some appropriate fabric. I had something unstructured and flowy in my head and there was none in the stash – finally found some lovely white linen at Spotlight because multiple trips to the increasingly unsatisfying Lincraft yielded nothing.

First I tried drawing pale heart shapes with pencils/crayons and roughly stitching around them. It wasn’t hideous, but I wasn’t really feeling it.

Then I did the worst thing I could have done, I got literal.

Yeah, no.

Unpick! Unpick!

I thought some more and this once again looked like being added to the abandoned projects list, so I turned to google image search (again).

This time I had more success! But that’s for the next post.