Stitch Stitch Stitch Stitch Stitch

Today's dog? Beans. Dog with beans. There is no sense in the world of flour sack towel embroidery. It's like falling down the rabbit hole. Puppies tumble over apples and gambol among beans. It's cute nonsense. Cute nonsense. Maybe that's redundant.

That's a crappy cell phone photo of the beans dog embroidery in progress, but in fact it's finished and all put away now and I've started on the Cyrillic alphabet sampler.

I decided to do the sampler as a counted cross-stitch because I have absolutely none of the things needed to do a counted cross-stitch project. Oh, I have the embroidery thread, but of course the only color that one should use to stitch up the Russian alphabet is red, right? And of course I didn't have enough red embroidery thread--and I didn't have any cross-stitch fabric (the stuff with the little squares) and I didn't have any blunt needles. Clearly the situation called for a trip to the craft store for some supplies.

I usually love to wander the aisles of the craft store looking at all the stuff I don't have and don't need. But today the craft store was full Christmas mode and that apparently meant that the store had to be fumigated with some kind of god-awful Christmasy clove-scented insecticide or something that made my eyes water and my lungs beg for mercy. I grabbed what I needed (red thread, tapestry needles, and--instead of fabric--some cool paper to cross-stitch on), and I hightailed it out of there. I came home and started my Cyrillic alphabet cross-stitch sampler:



And I already fucked up the Cyrillic sampler. See that character that looks like a lowercase b with a line over it? Yeah, that one. I messed that up. This is how it's supposed to look:



I just went ahead and put the right one next to the wrong one. Why? Well, I consider this sampler a kind of a practice sampler.

(And speaking of the practice, that's what you're looking at behind those cross-stitched letters, The Practice. That's Dermott What's-His-Face in the top photo and Camryn Manheim in the lower photo. I often listen to old episodes of this show on hulu.com while I'm stitching.)

What Else?

What else happened today besides crafting and embroidering? Well, I went to the gym twice (once this morning with Kelly First and Kevin, once this evening with Dave) and I had lunch with Dave and Lu. And I think that's it. There was a shower in there, too.