overcoming blog neglect with double craft post

what did i do yesterday while the rest of the world was hard at work?

well... after recovering the homestead from the weekend's festivities, doing laundry, baking some bread, and various other acts of domestic goddess-ish-ness, i treated myself to some pure, ol' fashioned craft time!

i made a pillow from a cross-stitched basset hound picture (from thrift store). i just added the border then sewed it on to an already existing pillowcase.

(this is for a friend who has basset hounds and was recently admiring a cross-stitched pillow in my house (below, on left, found at a garage sale in San Antonio)... i wonder if she'll see this post before i give the pillow to her?)

... and then i finished up this embroidery of some Daniel Higgs flash that i saw here and fell in love with. (Coincidentally, it was tattooed by Zach Nelligan - whom I blogged about before.)

i'm probably going to overcompensate for my lack of posting by posting a WHOLE BUNCH of stuff today... thanks for looking... whoever you are out there that looks at this stuff!

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more swazis

Shane Swift posted these gems on his tumblr today (his tumblr is nice and mostly full of actual paintings he's done - so check it out).

...which reminded me I hadn't yet posted this recent embroidery I did...

This is part of a "sampler" quilt-like-thing that I've been working on VERY SLOWLY for about a year (mostly stalled for many moons but I'm getting back to it...). Anyway, now and then I try out a new technique on this old bed sheet I had around.

I'm not very into doing embroidery because it's really slow and hurts my wrist a bit... but I do like how it looks and it will be neat to work away on this thing for years (or a lifetime) and have a "diary" of images I was interested in at various times...

Below are the previous "entries" in the diary (obviously I've a looooong way to go):

And lastly, these are various swastikas that I found around San Antonio while I was there last month:

(The blurry white jade on black background is actually Chinese jade from the 16 or 1700s. It was in an area of the SA Art Museum that you weren't supposed to take pictures of.)

* Related note, this looks like an interesting book - first published in 1896! Haven't read it yet but thanks to Chris Hold for pointing me in its direction.

* And lastly, here is a post about Pre-WWII roadsigns in Arizona:

http://arizona100.blogspot.com/2010/09/arizona-once-revered-swastika-eighty.html

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new dot

I finished another dot on the polka-dotted-embroidery-sampler-of-stuff-i-like-project last night. Appropriately, I did this while watching play-off hockey... Flyers won the series, as I wished for.

The Stanley Cup will go to either The Hawks or the Flyers (an original-6 against a 67-expansion team - so both kind of ol'timey... at least there will be no teal sweaters in the mix!) .

I don't care that much about either team but they were both my "favourites" in their respective conferences since my Penguins went out soooo... I'm kind of neutral/happy about either of them winning.

I think the Hawks will take it but I'm leaning towards cheering for Philly just because they picked up their conference trophy and had such a cool come-back against Boston.

I don't really know exactly why I'm so into hockey these days... but here are some of the factors: part boredom/hobby, part Canadiana, part liking to watch men in competition-mode because, frankly, it's hot, part having something to talk about with "everyman", part interest in the psychological phenomena around sport, part liking the outfits, and so on...

This ol'timey player is from an old Starr Skates advertisement.

Late Edit: After mulling it over some more... i decided to go back to my initial pick from when the Penguins got put out. I'm cheering for the Hawks. I'm glad Philly beat Montreal but I just can't cheer for the Guins' cross-state rivals. It would be wrong - even if I do secretly like their outfits better...