tarth sigil cross stitch

finally a project where i took progress pictures all the way through!

this pattern is my own design. it took almost exactly a month, working sporadically, from pattern to completion.

 outlining the sun panels

 stitching the first sun

lots of background stitching 

first sun panel finished! 

starting the second sun 

 more sun

 finished second sun and started background

 suns finished!

beginning the first moon panel 

first moon completed, now for the background 

 lots of blue

 nearly finished with this quarter

 3/4 done!

 last segment outlined and beginning to fill in

finished!

it's the sigil of tarth from game of thrones. brienne is my absolute favourite character. it still needs to be washed and ironed, and i'm not sure what i'm going to do with it (frame it? use it as a patch?) but i'm quite proud of the way it turned out!

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dragon eggs and other important things

phone pictures ahoy, sorry all. ive been real lazy using my SLR because my phone is always right there.

i stumbled across this tutorial on how to make dragon eggs and i decided this was something i needed in my life (despite my quest to cut down on clutter...). it was pretty easy, although i ended up needing a lot of tacks. i had nail polish on hand already. 

for this i used:

 -styrofoam eggs (ubiquitous around easter, perhaps a bit harder to find now)

-plain metal tacks from staples (i bought five packages of 200 to cover four eggs... you might need more or fewer depending on how big your eggs are, how much your tacks overlap, etc.)

-triple thick gloss glaze--you could also use mod podge or something similar

-nail polish (i used spoiled by wet and wild because i have a lot of them and they're cheap so i didn't feel bad using them up)

for the red egg i used:

-pick your poison

-i don't drink cheap wine

ants in my pants (for the glitter chunks)

for the green egg i used:

-the parking meteor expired (which is a gorrrgeous black w/ iridescent purple/blue/green sparklies)

-good karma

first i pushed a bunch of tacks into a box so that i would have a surface on which to work on them. i ended up covering the top side of the box in tacks--i had more than enough for the red egg but needed to paint even more tacks for the green one. i must have overlapped the tacks more on the green egg.

 

here are some of the painted tacks!

 

i started pressing them onto the egg base starting at the fatter end and making a spiral around the initial tack, overlapping the 'scales' with one another.

 

two completed dragon eggs, glazed! i'm halfway done with another and have a fourth base waiting to be covered.

i'm also working on a cross stitch project involving these designs:

i made them using perbee, which is a program intended for perler bead patterns, but i've found it works just fine for small cross stitch patterns. the pattern i'm actually making is much larger than the perbee designer allows for, but i've put it together in parts so that i have a decent idea of what i'm doing when it comes to actually stitching.

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