IHSW March- Some Pokemon Stitching, But Not All That Much

Hello! Earlier today, I did another post, featuring four new sprite patterns, and that should be directly under this. In this post, however, I have my final cross stitch WIP photo for International Hermit and Stitch Weekend, run by Joysze of Random Ramblings! As always, I did sort of a poor job of hermitting, since on Saturday, I went out to go shopping and see 21 Jump Street (which was quite funny) with my family. On Friday, however, when I did, for the most part, stay at home, I spent a lot more time staring at the wall and taking advantage of the fact that my copies of Marvel vs. Capcom and Soul Calibur for Dreamcast suddenly worked again than I did stitching. With the help of a lot of good old fashioned TV watchin', however, including another episode of Vampire Diaries on Netflix and a faulty DVD of a Lupin the III movie, I did get quite a bit of cross stitching done. I worked on the pattern of Meloetta from Pokemon that I posted on Friday and, during the weekend, almost got her outline done! I think that if I'd managed to finish watching Green Lantern tonight and keep stitching through it, I could have gotten done, finishing up her back and some of her hair, but it's nothing I can't finish up tomorrow night. I got her eyes and jewel filled in, too, with some bright blue DMC satin floss! It was sort of a pain to stitch with, and it doesn't show up in my bad photos, but in the end, I think it'll look cool. Either way, though, here are my three photos from this weekend, showing what I got stitched on Friday, Saturday and Sunday!

I've read a lot of really neat IHSW wrap-up posts already, and am hoping to read quite a bit more of them tomorrow. Until then, I hope that all of you are doing well with whatever crafts or projects you're working on and having a nice end to your weekends!

Small Sprite Patterns of The IT Crowd Cast

Hello! This is not my IHSW finishing post, which I'm going to do later tonight. I know that it's probably a bad idea to post twice in one day, but I'm not really doing much else, so it doesn't seem too awful. Anyway, it probably tells you just how dedicated to stitching I've been this weekend that, this afternoon, I finished washing the dishes and sat down on the living room floor to draw out a new set of sprite patterns. It took quite a while to do, and it was actually much less efficient than doing the patterns digitally, like I usually do, would have been, though it didn't make the process any easier or more difficult. What I ended up with when I was finished filling in squares on my graph paper, however, was four brand new sprite patterns featuring some cast members of The IT Crowd! These cross stitch patterns were requested months ago, so I know that it's very slow to just be making and posting them today, but my siblings were watching the show, so it was a good reminder, and the fact that these are here now is proof that I do get requests done eventually! Regardless of all of that, however, here are today's patterns, featuring Moss, Roy, Douglas, and Jen all in simplified versions of outfits they wore on the show.

I think that these turned out to be nice enough patterns and will probably stitch them myself, mostly because I think it'll be fun to have a bunch of sitcom characters for my collection of stitched sprite standees. Moss and Roy both have a little bit of backstitching, but not enough that they'd look bad as perler projects, and Jen and Douglas are completely free of it. As an additional note, if you want to stitch the sprites from the opening credits of The IT Crowd rather than these Phantasy Star II versions of the characters, Chris at Other Dork Stitch has them posted on his blog!

Since I'm going to be posting here again later tonight, I'm done here for now and off to do a little more cross stitching before the weekend ends! Still, I hope you guys have had a good weekend so far! I've seen so many cool posts about International Hermit and Stitch Weekend already, and I know there's going to be a lot more of them tomorrow, so I feel sort of motivated to make noticeable progress on my current project while I watch TV tonight!

A New Pokemon Pattern

Hello! I've felt a little out of it for the past couple of days, so I don't know how long this post will go on in terms of typing. This weekend, however, is International Hermit and Stitch Weekend, as hosted by Joysze at Random Ramblings. I've wanted to cross stitch Meloetta, a Pokemon that Americans are not supposed to know about yet, despite the fact that the internet can bring badly scanned magazine articles from any country to people the world over, for quite a while, though, so I decided that she could be my weekend project. The pattern I made is detailed enough, but with a relatively low color count, and her bright green hair is quite appropriate for the St. Patrick's Day weekend, though I don't really care much about that. As long as I'd made Melotta's pattern, however, I figured that I might as well post it, in case any of the rest of you would like to cross stitch her, too! Here is the pattern.

On Sunday night, I'll do a post about how far I've gotten on this project, but, until then, I'm done blogging for now. I hope that you guys have nice weekends!

I Finished Cross Stitching Holo and Worked Less Enthusiastically on Some Other Stuff, Too!

Hello! Before I get started with this post, I would like to say that I do not have any new patterns for today. I did get a lot of cool new requests for sprite patterns, so I wrote them down in my tiny Chococat notebook and am planning to make a few of them for a post in the next couple of days. For tonight, however, I just have a standard "Oooh, look at what I made!" post, so hopefully it doesn't end up being boring!

Last night, I finally finished my cross stitch of Holo, from Spice and Wolf (which I've never actually watched, though I do read the books), so I wanted to write a post here to show it off. I would have done it last night, when I actually finished the project, but I felt sort of lazy, so I ended up sitting around playing Mario Picross and watching Casshern: Sins instead. It isn't a very big project, but I think it came out all right, and I really like how the oranges in her hair look on the gray fabric. I'd been wanting to stitch this pattern for a long time, too, so now it's actually done! Since she's finished now, I took the time to do a nice scan of the project, so here she is, now without all the blurriness of the photos I had before!

Since I finished her last night, I had plenty of time to get another project started after I was done with subbing for today, which I would rather not spend a lot of time typing about here. Stitching Holo was fun, and I've made a ton of midsized portrait patterns, so I decided to pick another one of those to make, going with one of my patterns of Tsukasa from Lucky Star. The pattern is a little smaller than my last one, so I'm hoping that it doesn't take too long, even if I do get distracted and stitch five other things before she's finished. Here, however, is a tiny photo of my small start on Tsukasa!

I think that, if I'd actually been able to focus, I could have gotten quite a bit of her stitched tonight. About halfway through American Idol, however, I started to feel like, if I had to cross stitch any more, I'd throw my project out the front door and wait for a wild animal to rip it to shreds. That seemed like a poor attitude to be stitching with, so rather than continue with that, I cut paper strips for the rest of American Idol and then, during an episode of Vampire Diaries on Netflix, folded a bunch of paper stars. I use them to fill jars and make earrings and stuff like that, and star folding is a great way to kill time while riding in a car or watching TV. I got a nice pile of them folded tonight, though, so here is what they look like! (I've been scolded before for never posting any photos of my folded stuff on here, so that's part of the reason for this.)

With that, I'm pretty much out of photos to post, so I suppose that I'm done with this for now! I'll be back soon with some actual patterns, though, hopefully from the list of requests I've gotten. I have a Pokemon pattern that I want to make, too, mostly for my own use, but I don't imagine I'll hear too many complaints about that. At the end of the weekend, I'll be making my IHSW post for this month, too, so hopefully, I'll actually get something done! Have a good night, and good luck with your craft projects!

Two Sprite Patterns For Some Dragon Ball Z Cross Stitching Fun

Hello! Last week, through the Dork Stitch Facebook page, I got a request for some sprite patterns of Dragon Ball Z characters. Though I should probably find a way to say more about the whole thing, it sounded like making the cross stitch patterns would be fun, so I decided start working on them. (Plus, working on a set of sprite patterns for characters so muscle-y and frilly clothing free practically guarantees that a lot of other sprite requests are going to get filled between chunks of these.) I was tempted to go to Google, type in Dragon Ball Z, find two one-episode only entrants in tournaments, and make patterns of them to start the new set, but instead, I ended up just making patterns of Goku and Vegeta, since that seemed like it would work a bit better. I know that a lot of people really like the show and the manga, though, so if there are any characters that you guys would like to see done in the near future, just list them in the comments and I'll do my best to make a decent pattern of them. For today, however, here are the first two Dragon Ball Z sprite patterns, featuring Goku and Vegeta.

Patterns-wise, that's all I've got for you today, but I do have yet another WIP photo of Holo, from Spice and Wolf, to show off. I don't have all that much more done than I did on Sunday night, since yesterday was really busy, and yesterday, I realized that I forgot a row, making her head one stitch two short. She's almost finished, though, and in terms of her appearance, the skipped row doesn't seem to make much of a difference, especially since I designed the pattern and know that I am not really screwing up any sort of marvelously detailed needlework by making the error. Here is another blurry photo of my progress, probably marking the last one I'll post before the project is finished! After her, I'll have to pick another one of my midsized portrait patterns to stitch, but I do have one of them in mind.

I'm done posting for today now, though I should be back pretty soon with more patterns and photos and all of that. As I said before, if you have any requests for Dragon Ball Z sprite patterns, let me know who you'd like to see before things get out of hand! Until the next post, however, I hope that you guys are doing pretty well and making good progress with all of your stitching projects!

Old Looking Sprites to Cross Stitch of an XBox 360 Fighting Game Character, Featuring Crimson Viper

Hello! Before I get going with this post, I want to write a bit about a dream I had last night. A lot of it was pretty nightmarish, due to some unspecified emergency that everyone seemed to think was about to doom us all, but at one point in it, one of my brothers walked up on stage in the high school gym, stood behind a microphone, and gave this review of The Orange Box, which my family has for our XBox. "The Orange Box has been orange-ing up my XBox for years. It has several surfaces, and the numbers are great."
After that, most of the dream was people wondering what the end of days would look like, but when I told everyone about it this morning, that part stood out as being particularly good, so I just wanted to share it with you guys. It was certainly less disturbing than the rest of the dream, but not really any less confusing, so I guess that it sort of fit.

Anyway, for today's post, I have two brand new cross stitch patterns of Crimson Viper from Street Fighter IV and some subsequent fighting games. I realize that this may be of limited appeal, but I can't go too long without doing a post like this, so it should tide me over for the next couple of weeks. A lot of you who read this may have noticed that, as far as fighting games go, I tend to play a lot more games from SNK than Capcom, which is mostly because I'm a snotty fangirl. That doesn't mean that I have anything at all against Capcom's games, however, and though I haven't played it for a while, I thought that Street Fighter IV was a pretty spiffy game and usually ended up playing as Crimson Viper. Because the graphics in Street Fighter IV are that weird polygonal semi-3D stuff with black lines all over the place and people that get weird and bulgy-eyed when they get hit, though, it's more difficult to just go, "Oh, I think that I ought to cross stitch this character!" than it is with a lot of other games. I didn't really intend to let that stop me, though, so I decided to make a fake 8-bit version of her, like she might look in one of the pirated NES versions of the older Street Fighter games. I've done this with King of Fighters characters before, and though it was fun, I didn't feel like I got things to look quite right. With this pattern, though, I thought that the character worked really well with the less detailed style, even after I'd switched the sprite I made to the slightly off NES colors. I ended up putting it on a grid that divided it into 8x8 squares as I worked, so I could do a color switch and give her a bright yellow belt buckle at the cost of some of her hair being the wrong color, which I've seen a few times in the bootlegged game sprites, and even though her outfit is supposed to be black, I used a dark blue for this sprite, since it looked cooler. I might try this again with some more fighting game characters, but for now, here's my stitched version of the faux NES Crimson Viper sprite.

Now, in case you're looking at that and going, "Wow! I can't wait to make this incredibly specific and completely unnecessary cross stitch project for myself! I've sat up at night just praying that someone would look at the sprites from a bootleg NES game and say to themselves that they needed to make a cross stitch pattern of something very similar to them, but of a different character," you're in luck! Here is the pattern for the project pictured above.

In the more likely event that you like the character and wouldn't mind stitching or perler beading her, but don't really want to put that much time into it, however, here is a sprite pattern of Crimson Viper in this blog's standard format! As far as my collection goes, she should look super cool between the cast of Robotech and the two leads from The Artist, so I hope that some of you like this chart, too.

After all of that rubbish, I should probably just quit typing and go to bed, but I have a blurry and crooked WIP photo of my cross stitch of Holo from Spice and Wolf to post before I go! I didn't work on this for a long time, but she's been my project of choice for the last few days and is almost done. The middle color in her hair got finished today, which was the most tedious part of it, so I think I should be able to finish it in the next couple of days. Right now, however, it looks sort of weird.

Now that I have that posted, I really am done for tonight, though I'm hoping to be back with another post in the next couple of days. I got a request for some sprite patterns from an anime that's been very popular for a long time that I'd like to start working on, so that should be fun, and I'd like to do a new features post soon, too, which should be quite cool. Until then, however, I hope all of you are doing well and starting off your weeks nicely!

This Post May Contain a Cross Stitch Pattern of Coco From Foster's Home For Imaginary Friends

Hello! Tonight, my post here is not going to be very long, seeing as I subbed for a P.E. class stuck in a study hall today and ended up having my brain totally fried. Considering the general lack of success I had in sending out coherent e-mails four hours ago, it could be argued that, by this point, I shouldn't even be allowed near a computer keyboard, let alone permitted to blog. I've got a new pattern that I'm pretty excited about to post, though, so I think I can stay coherent at least until I've shared that!

A few days ago, I was trying to think of a fun character to make a portrait pattern of before making the next one in the Clannad set (which will be Ryou, by the way), and, since making a pattern of Hot Dog Princess was fun, I decided that I'd use another American cartoon character as the subject. Since that didn't narrow things down much at all, it took a bit longer to actually pick a character. After a lucky weather report, however, my sister started in on the "It's hot in To-Peeeek-Aaaaaa" bit from Foster's Home For Imaginary Friends, I decided that I'd make a character from that. Coco seemed like she'd be the most fun to cross stitch, so she ended up being my choice. (I'd stitched Bloo before, from a pattern by Dawn, posted at her blog, Anime Stitching.) Plus, bird/tree/airplane creatures are very amusing, so that worked in her favor, too.

Coco's pattern looks quite a bit larger than a lot of the ones I've posted here, at 95 stitches tall, but since she's not a perfect rectangle in terms of shape, she shouldn't be an incredibly time consuming project. There are a lot of color changes involved, meaning that stitching her won't require a great deal of single color chunks, and I like that all of the colors in it are bright and relatively easy to match, even if you don't have the floss colors listed. I'm pretty excited about stitching this, so if you guys want to cross stitch or perler bead Coco, too, here is the pattern!

Now that today's pattern is posted, it's time to show off what I've been working on lately, which, actually, is not that much. I have gotten four more of my sprite patterns stitched since my last post, though, so here is a picture of them. From left to right, the characters included in this image are Utena (Revolutionary Girl Utena), Tamaki (Ouran Host Club), Light (Death Note), and Ash (Pokemon). While I don't necessarily think these characters would get along, since one member of the group would probably end up making sure that the other three were no longer a problem for him, they were all fun to stitch, and I think they'll make nice additions to my collection of cross stitch standees.

Now that all of that is finished, I'm done here for today, though I'm hoping to have a new post and new patterns for you guys sometime later this week! Until then, I hope all of you have gotten your weeks off to a good start and are doing well with all of your craft projects.

Small Cross Stitch Patterns of Six Love Hina Characters and Some Other Stuff

Hello! Tonight, I am giving my new computer, an older refurbished iBook that I've been using quite successfully for image editing, a little bit of a test by trying to use it to do a blog post. I'm pretty sure that it'll work, but I've put together a pretty image heavy post to see if adding pictures makes it freeze up like the desktop computer does. Either way, though, it's a good excuse to blog and watch Netflix at the same time, allowing me to inflict new sprite patterns on the world while watching Casshern and finding other completely unproductive ways to multitask.

Anyway, what's more important than the reason why I decided to do this post is probably what it contains, so tonight, I have some new sprite patterns featuring the main cast of Love Hina. When I started these this afternoon, I thought that it would take me forever to get them done, but what I'd failed to remember was that, on Love Hina, the characters wore fairly ordinary, non-elaborate clothing, and the hairstyles weren't that fancy, either. A couple of them were still sort of difficult to get right, and I did end up taking a while on them, but by the end of the afternoon, I had the six patterns that I wanted to have done finished! I'd still sort of like to make some of the supporting cast to go with these, since this set was fun to make. For now, though, here are more Love Hina sprite patterns than I'm sure any of you expected for tonight!

With all of that posted, this computer is performing beautifully so far, so I guess that I'll be able to post a photo of the three sprites that I stitched since my last post. From left to right, the first of them is Peppy from The Artist, which I'm actually really happy with. I didn't know how well all of the backstitching on her dress would work out, but I like how it ended up, and I got to use some glitter floss for the bodice of her dress, too, which was fun. The middle one is Vicious from Cowboy Bebop, who got stitched because I already had the gray floss out after making George and Peppy, and the sprite to the right is Sabrina from Pokemon, who I made because I wanted to do something with bright colors.

With both of those things posted, I think that I'm done for tonight, though I should be back with more patterns and such soon! I want to do another portrait pattern next, and since the start of March is tomorrow, I hope to have a new features post before too long, too. As always, if you have any pattern requests, let me know and I will do my best to fill them.

Before I log off, I would like to post this video that I stole off of my sister's Facebook page in memory of Davy Jones. If you're reading this blog from the U.S., Antenna TV is doing a 59-episode Monkees marathon this weekend, ending with Head, the movie this is from, and regardless of your location, Iotacons has also posted a very nice tribute tonight.

Two New Sprite Patterns Featuring Characters From Revolutionary Girl Utena

Hello! For the past couple of days, I've been enjoying stitching some of my sprite patterns, which has made me want to design some new ones, too. This afternoon, my desire to make some new sprite patterns didn't really pan out, since I instead ended up refreshing the listings for substitute teaching jobs over and over while reading reviews of really bad old anime on a long-defunct site that I found again through the Anime Web Turnpike. Tonight, however, I was just focused enough to actually get something done, meaning that for tonight's post, I have two brand new sprite patterns, featuring Utena and Anthy from Revolutionary Girl Utena! I've been wanting to make these characters for a long time, and actually think it would be cool to make the whole cast, since I had a lot of the series on VHS from a Right Stuf clearance bin and was always impressed by what a weird show it was. When I thought about it before, though, I thought that getting all of the details right on Utena's outfit would be too difficult, or that pixelling Anthy's fancy rose bride dress would turn out to be a pain. Tonight, however, I wanted to do some new anime sprites, so I sat down to make those two characters, and I think that it turned out well! If you'd like to decide how they look for yourself, here are tonight's new sprite patterns!

With those posted and all ready to stitch, which I plan to do at some point, this post is almost complete! Before I go, though, I want to post a photo of the two stitched sprite patterns that got my new sheet of these started off and led to this, featuring Bianca from Pokemon (because of the newly announced Pokemon Black/White 2) and George Valentin from The Artist (because of the Academy Awards). I stitched both of these within the last two days, and have quite a bit of a third one done, too! She should be ready to show off by the time I post again.

I'm all done with this blog for tonight, but I still feel fairly enthusiastic about patterns, so I should be back and posting again rather soon! I have a few portrait patterns started and a lot of ideas for sprite patterns, so I hope they work out well. Before I go, I also want to say, in response to a comment that I got on my last post, that I post all of these patterns so that anyone who wants to stitch or bead or do whatever with them can do so. I do make a lot of them for myself or for specific requests, but if I wanted them to be private, I wouldn't post them, so the more people that do use them, the better! Anyway, have a good evening and good luck with all of your craft projects.

IHSW February and Two New Naruto Cross Stitch Patterns

Hello! Lately, I've been working on putting my town's community newsletter together, so for the past few days, I haven't been able to do quite as much blogging as I'd like. I just got a nice draft of it that I can present at a meeting tomorrow night finished and ready to go, though, so that shouldn't be an issue for the next few months!

Today's post is pretty much just going to stick to what the title says it will, starting with the small project that I did for this month's International Hermit and Stitch Weekend, as hosted by Joysze at Random Ramblings. A lot of times, I try to use the Hermit and Stitch Weekends to get a big chunk of a bigger project done, but this month, I looked at all of my big projects and just sort of decided that I didn't want to work on them. Because of that, I decided that it was time to finally try stitching one of Gatchacaz's pretty blackwork Pokemon patterns! (Piles of them can be seen and found on her blog, and they're all very spiffy.) Since I'm not very skilled with blackwork, I started with one of her easier patterns and ended up stitching Umbreon, since it's a cool Pokemon and the fill pattern she chose looked like it would look impressive when stitched. I was thrilled with my finished project, since I'd been really concerned that I'd screw the whole thing up. The original pattern called for black thread, and I decided that it would be more fun to stitch in a fake tie-dyed floss, which could have very easily gone wrong. I think that it worked out, though, even if the variegated yellow I picked for this was way too light, so here is my blackwork Umbreon, looking very rainbow-y and bright!

With that segment of the post done with, it's time for today's two new cross stitch patterns, which happen to be sprite patterns of characters from Naruto! It's been a while since I last filled any requests for sprite patterns, so today's charts are of Anko and Kakashi, who were both asked for by readers. Neither pattern is all that fancy or detailed, so even though Anko requires some backstitching, I think that both of them would look quite nice in perler beads. To be completely honest, though, I'm just happy that they resemble the characters from the anime, so I hope that you guys like them, too!

I think that I'm out of stuff to post for today, so I should probably end my blog post here. It felt sort of weird and backwards to post the finished work first and the patterns second, but I guess that it's not so strange. Either way, though, I'm hoping to make some new patterns and be ready to post again within the next few days, so until then, enjoy your week and have good luck with all of your crafting!