Incoherent Scribblings

Let me repeat that… I love vacation because I get to stitch! After I did the requisite errands today so I can head off to Arkansas tomorrow and I took a little nap, I spent the rest of my day stitching. (Warning to any burglars thinking about breaking in and robbing me while I am gone: I have four attack cats that will rip you to shreds if you step over my threshold and I am taking all my expensive/important things with me. So nah, nah, n’a boo boo on you!)

Anyway, today I worked on my “Cool Fall Cat” and got all of the cross stitching done. Obviously I still need to backstitch, but once I do that I will have a pretty big happy dance because the fall cat is the last of the four cats! I started it last December… in fact, I started it last time I was visiting Dawn. How appropriate that I will finish it there as well.

I did notice however that for some odd reason I seem to have backstitched the winter cat in 3799. The chart calls for the cats to be backstitched in black and that is what I used to backstitch the spring and summer cats, so I have no idea what I what possessed me to backstitch the winter one (it was the first one I stitched) in 3799 instead.

I am trying to decide if I should rip the 3799 out and re-backstitch it in black or just leave it. All four cats are on one piece of fabric, but unless you are really looking it isn’t that obvious that the winter cat is backstitched in a different color. I will ask Dawn her opinion when I see her, but as of now I am leaning towards leaving it because it is such a pain in the ass to frog backstitching.

Eh, we’ll see…

Well, I lost. I failed NaBloPoMo. I forgot to post yesterday. Oh well, that’s the way the cookie crumbles I guess.

But I have stitching to show today! I have a happy dance!

Originally I wasn’t going to show this yet, but the person that this is for knows that I am terrible about keeping secrets and she will be receiving it from me on Wednesday anyway.

Drum roll please…

Behold! I present the gift that I made for my little goddaughter, Megan Renee. This is a Lizzie*Kate design simply entitled “Baby Sampler.” This pattern has two versions of the baby sampler: One is long and contains the baby’s name and his/her birthdate and the other is square and just contains space for the name.

I was originally going to stitch the long one, but since I wanted to include the baby’s first and middle name and there was only room for the first name I had to get creative. (I just had to include the middle name! She is my namesake after all…) In the end I decided to do the square one, stitch it over one, and make it into a two-sided ornament. I substituted the word “baby” in the spot where the name was supposed to go and put Megan’s first and middle names and birthdate on the back. I then made it into a whipstitch ornament and added beads along the sides. I love the way it turned out and I know Dawn (and Megan) will too!

Wah! I don’t want to post tonight. I just don’t feel like writing. But since I have been doing so well with the whole NaBloPoMo thing, I will at least attempt to entertain you with some drivel this evening.

So… I stitched most of the evening and will have a happy dance sometime this weekend. It is my super-secret project for a certain someone so I won’t be able to show it for a while, but let me assure you this project is very precious.

I have to work tomorrow, but after that I will be on vacation until December 3. And guess where I am going for Thanksgiving?

To Dawn’s to see Baby Megan Renee! (And the rest of the family too, of course!)

I have a million things to do before I leave on Tuesday, but I am still going to try to fulfill my NaBloPoMo commitment… even if I have to enable mobile blogging so I can blog from the road.

I finished Twilight last weekend. Quickly and easily summed up it is book candy. It is fun to read, but in my opinion there is very little substance. Will I read the other books in the series? Probably. They should be quick reads and I didn’t hate the characters or the premise.

But…

Maybe I have been reading too much literature lately, but I had some problems with Twilight.

To begin with, I didn’t feel like the characters had much depth and I saw very little character development. I thought Edward had the potential to be a complex character, but unfortunately he stayed pretty flat throughout the book. He is mysterious, which I think is one of the reasons that Bella is drawn to him, and we do learn something about how he became a vampire, but he doesn’t reveal anything about what it is like to be a vampire. Obviously he is drawn to Bella, but when the reader learns about his attraction it is described in animalistic terms. He claims to love her, but we don’t know why.

The character of Bella bothered me on a number of levels. As I mentioned briefly last week, I was irritated by her whole “damsel in distress” persona. I also didn’t like the way she thinks Edward is so damn perfect. Now, this could be part of his vampire allure or it could just be the fact that she is a teenager with stars in her eyes for the cute brooding guy in the corner, but even after she gets to know him, Bella finds absolutely no flaws in Edward.

Once Bella finds out Edward is a vampire, she isn’t disturbed in the least. Now, I have fallen for a “bad boy” or two in my day and I understand how easy it is to disregard the warnings you get about that “bad boy,” but you still are aware of the risk… that’s what makes the “bad boy” exciting. However, Bella doesn’t even seem to be aware that she is dating a “bad boy”; Even when he tells her.

As far as a “vampire story” goes, it is going to take a lot of convincing to get me to say that this one deserves all the attention that it has received. I love vampire stories and I have read quite a few in my day. I have read ones where the vampires are truly monsters with no conscience, but my favorite ones are about vampires who bemoan the fact that they feed off human blood and are searching for some kind of salvation. Edward is supposed to be this kind of vampire, which is why I was interested in reading the book in the first place, but because his character lacks development I don’t see him searching for any kind of release from what he is… maybe that comes later in the series, I don’t know.

The author also takes a lot of liberties with vampire lore. Of course that is part of the fun writing fantasy: You can disregard convention so, for example, sunlight doesn’t have to be lethal to your vampire. However, if you move too far away from the accepted lore, your reader can find it difficult to identify your character as a vampire and then in some ways your book becomes nothing more than another cheesy teenage love story.

I’m too tired to write much tonight so I though I would try The One-Minute Writer Prompt of the Day. Today’s prompt is:

Listen. Write about what you hear, right now.

Right now I am listening to Mötley Crüe’s “Girls, Girls, Girls” on the new “boom box” I bought for my iPod. Since I bought my iPod in May I have been looking for something so that I can listen without headphones and I have found it. It is the Altec Lansing inMotion iM600 Portable Audio System for iPod.

Wow… a minutes sure goes by fast when you are writing, doesn’t it?

P.S. Given the nature of this exercise my writing has not been edited. Please forgive any grammatical errors you may find.