A stitch in time

Yesterday, Lucy wrote that, after a long break, she has picked up her cross stitch again. Yay! I sometimes set mine aside for months at a time and I don't understand why -- I always feel such joy when I return to it. Stitching both excites and soothes me. Lucy laments the lack of cool cross stitch patterns out there, and I have to second her. While I am a fan of certain companies' patterns (Birds of a Feather, The Prairie Schooler), in general I find that the widely available patterns are sort of, well, icky. I'm just not into kittens and flowers and snowmen and Bible verses. (Although someday I plan to recreate the scarily religious sampler hanging above the bed in the movie Cold Comfort Farm, the one that says, "No man knoweth the hour of his death.") Right now I'm working on this interesting pattern called Le Printemps from Birds of a Feather. My sister Mary called it "primitive," but that's not the right word. I think it looks like a pencil sketch done in thread -- it has this very un-cross-stitch-like quality to it, which I find fascinating. It should take me about, oh, forever to complete it.

Lucy isn't quite as big a fan of Subversive Cross Stitch as I am. But even more than the actual patterns, I appreciate Julie Jackson's concept: she's designing the kinds of things that she wants to see. Although I'm not as skilled as she (and I certainly can't create anything like Le Printemps), I've started making a few patterns of my own. Here, for instance, is Norman's blog motto:

That's a quote from, I believe, Phantasm. I need to figure out how to add a couple of cross stitch bullet holes to the pattern. And here's a great haiku from Feral Mom:

It still needs something, some kind of image or border, but it's coming along. Maybe I'll scan these and post them after I've stitched them up.