Beer ghost by night

I had been having trouble getting a decent image of the glow in the dark thread of the beer ghost but my bf came to the rescue with his camera and saved the day! We had a little ambient light from the TV to help make the rest of the embroidery visible while also making the ghost more than visible in the dark.

Of course while we were at it we also made a new photo of the Beer ghost in the graveyard embroidery:

Camera settings for both photo's:
Shutter Speed: 1 second
Aperture: F/2.8
Focal Length: 6 mm
ISO Speed: 800

Beer Ghost in MOvember complete!

I have no real idea how Beer Ghost managed to make himself a moustache as ghosts don't grow hair but I'm not going to ask either - some things one doesn't need to know and any way... he might want MY beer! He's looking in astonishment at the beer he was given in a pub as it's bigger than he is. He's also wondering why, when he ordered a pilsner, he got a bitter instead but, as he never wastes a beer when he sees one, that's a problem he can think over while he has this one.

As I mentioned in previous posts the embroidery of the beer did not turn out as expected as in the pattern creator it showed as a pilsner type beer but it ended up a lot darker and looks more like a bitter now. The difference in colour is probably because I mostly still have and use pre-1995 DMC. This is of significance because that's around the time they had to change how they dyed the threads due to new European laws and many colours are no longer exactly the same as they were.

All in all I'm happy with the end result even though it's not what I expected. I'm actually surprised it only took me a few days to make this.

The embroidery is 4 5/8" wide and 3 3/4" high / 11,75 cm wide x 9,5 cm high
Number of stitches: 2319
Fabric used: 18 ct / 7 squares per cm Aida
Date started: 19th November
Date completed: 25th November
There are 90 colours of DMC used in the embroidery in total - 88 in the glass of beer and 18 in the beer ghost

When things go wrong...

They keep going wrong. I fixed the lighter line near the bottom so that looks ok now but the higher up I go in the height of the glass the less like the pattern it looks and the more it looks like some weird something or another I'm hoping that somehow or another things come together but it's at least 4 shades darker than the pattern says it is so time will tell.

As you can see by comparing the two they look VERY different indeed. I have very carefully followed the pattern taking great care to use the correct colour as with a pattern with this many colours a small mistake can soon really mess things up.

At the time of writing I have only 30 colours left to do so I won't bore you with a massive list of colours used hehe.

Beer Ghost gets company...

As you can see Beer Ghost has some "company"now. I'll leave you to guess who/what it is :) I'm surprised I got this far as Wednesday night I went to bed just after I'd finished tucking the kids in and yesterday I had to run around to appointments, shops and stuff which used up a lot of time. I'm moderately unhappy with the yellowish line between the brown lines near the bottom - it wasn't supposed to be this much lighter but the pattern app thought that the colour it put there was darker than it really is. I suspect that my pre 1995 colours are the cause of this more than anything and I probably will swap colours around a little to compensate and rip out that line of yellow to sort it out properly. Other than that I'm really happy with the gradients of the colours.

I'm not entirely certain I've finished with the colours I've used so I'll just list the colours used since Wednesday and see what I still need to re-use later.

Actively working with: 
918

Used but possibly not finished with:

159
341
355
444
451
740
741
775
780
781
783
919
920
921
947
970
972
975
3583
3747
3756
3776
3826

Movember Beer Ghost

These are the colours that I will be using for my project - I'm not going to paste the list - I'll stick to saying that there are 90 colours that will be used in this project (yes I know - totally nuts)

So far I have completed SATW's Beer Ghost with his movember moustache and I'm about to start the item he's looking at with amazement. He's been stitched with glow in the dark thread and hopefully I will get a nice photo of him glowing in the dark sometime next week.

So far I have only completed 2 clours:
Black and glow in the dark.

Norway Loves Fish

I had a lot of trouble deciding which Norway to do. Should I do him with his fish on his head? In his hand? No fish? In the end I chose this one because the expression he had made me laugh.

Finished size: 4 3/4 high x 2 2 1/2 wide, that's about 11,5 x 6,25 cm according to my rulers.
Fabric used: 18 count / 7 squares per cm Aida

Artwork from this comic by humon all I did was convert it to an embroidery pattern and make that.

SATW Sister Japan gets a yaoi surprise

I've always loved the expression on her face when she sees Denmark and Netherlands "at it" again, especially when they include Germany as well. I found that the blood spatters after were a bit too complicated to do so I used the image just above instead.

 I had taken this with me when I went along as a chaperone for my kids yearly school trip and the kids (8 and 9 year old kids) asked me what I was making...

 I settled with "she's in love with a boy and she's just seen him", which they thought was lovely. I decided that they were definitively too young to know about yaoi *wink*

If you haven't realised it yet - this is what I was making last time I made a picture hehe.

Finished size: 3 5/8 high x 2 1/8 wide, that's about 9 x 5,25 cm according to my ruler.
Fabric used: 18 count / 7 squares per cm Aida.

Artwork from this comic by :humon: all I did was convert it to an embroidery pattern and make that.

SATW "Sister Sweden"

I finished SATW's Sister Sweden last night - it took a bit longer than I'd expected but that was mostly because my hands didn't really want to work much which made holding the needle somewhat complicated. I hate it when it suddenly gets cold in the summer - my "ageing" joints kick in and set up a complaints department.

Finished size: 4 1/8 high x 2 1/8 wide, that's about 10,5 x 5,5 cm according to my ruler.
Fabric used: 18 count or 7 squares per cm Aida

Artwork from this comic by humon all I did was convert it to an embroidery pattern and make that.

Almost finished!

Yes indeed it's almost finished - these little embroideries are really fast, especially as once the outlines are completed I can steam ahead and fill in spaces without needing the pattern to do more than choose the right colour to use next.

I've only got a bit of skin to complete and then the hair and it's finished and as it's pouring with rain the plan to go out this afternoon has been cancelled, so I'll have more time to complete this. We were going to go to an old communal bakery to see what it was like in the old days when people baked their breads there and then on to the fire engine museum. Neither the kids nor me want to get dripping wet on our bicycles getting there and the activities are mostly outside.

A new project

At last I can go back to the SATW project I started where I'm doing a load of the characters in cross stitch. I really love the style of art that humon, the artist, makes so I've been working very hard at making sure that the patterns are as close to the art as I can possibly make them given the restrictions of cross stitch being little squares and making them no more than 3 1/4 inches wide when completed.

This one is "Sister Sweden" and as you an see she's a pretty busty sex bomb :) and she will only need 7 colours to complete so it's pretty straight forwards. Once I've completed the black outlines I basically won't need the pattern much any more :)

Lego Demon from SATW

So I got this crazy idea to see what it would be like to turn one of my Scandinavia and the World embroidery patterns into Lego. I raided my oldest son's Lego stash for the job as he was away on school camp and couldn't complain about the mess I made hehe (that youngest has less bricks has absolutely nothing to do with it *wink* ).

First I built it one brick wide and counted one lengthways stud as a stitch but my son just didn't have enough black and white Lego that wasn't already in use in other projects for me to do that so I had to take it apart and start again.

I then decided to borrow one of youngest's large grey base plates and used that as the base to build on and counted one stud as one stitch and I found that I had *just* enough black and white to just about complete it - I would have preferred to completely cover the baseplate with white but well.. I need to top up the kids Lego bricks first lol

Artwork from this comic by humon all I did was convert it to an embroidery pattern (which I made already as an embroidery) and make that in Lego. If you haven't read any of her comics before you are missing out - they are amazing!
Scandinavia and the World: satwcomic.com