Dragons and wardens and cross stitch ...

Hosted by the lovely Trish, here: http://www.lovelaughterinsanity.com

So,  a few months ago, I ventured into video games for basically the first time ever.

I never played them before because I'm absolutely terrible with gaming consoles. I can't use them for some reason.

But THEN somehow I found out you could also play using mouse/keyboard and so I thought "well, I'll give it a go, see what happens."

(Stay with me.)

What happened was I bought Dragon Age Origins and Dragon Age 2 in a bundle that Mighty Ape had on special at the time. I leaped in with Dragon Age because I'd seen people talk about Inquisition, and I thought "hey, that sounds like fun," and ... well, the rest is history, sort of.

I started playing in December and ... what, seven months later? I'm finally nearly at the end of the game. Go me, right? (THIS IS ABOUT CREATIVITY I SWEAR JUST BEAR WITH ME).

Now, I tend to get enthusiastic about things that I love.

Cats, for example.
STATION ELEVEN.
Whittaker's artisan sea salt and caramel chocolate.

And I am very very very enthusiastic about Dragon Age. So much so, that I went poking about on Etsy recently, looking for cross-stitch patterns of the Grey Wardens' motto.

(Told you it was about creativity.)

I found a couple of patterns, and they were ... nice. But not what I wanted.

So, for the first time ever, as someone who cannot draw a stick person, I'm embarking on creating my very own pattern.

I'm not actually .... creating it, as in drawing it from scratch because that way madness lies for us all.

It's more ... a cobbling-together.

The Grey Wardens motto is this:
In peace, vigilance. In war, victory. In death, sacrifice.

Also, in the legend of the game, the original Grey Wardens would fly into battle on griffons. So I want to incorporate that, too.

I started with the alphabet. For the "I" on each sentence, I wanted something a little bit elaborate - and I found a free cross-stitch alphabet that suited my purposes. (I found it by googling 'free old english cross-stitch alphabets'). Here's the link: http://www.needlework.com/old-english-alphabet/

For the rest of the motto, I wanted something with a tiny kick to it, but nothing too elaborate.

My Saturday night stitch-and-watch friend has a book of alphabets, so I've borrowed that for the lettering of the rest of the motto. On the book cover to your left, it's the small green one, second alphabet down. It's simple, but still has a bit of a curl to it.


The final piece of the puzzle was the griffon. So I googled once again - Dragon Age griffon - and found one that, as far as I know, falls under fair use. I'm not planning on selling the final product, so I saved the image and ran it through a free pattern generator. I guessed at the colour numbers - I chose 15, but may do it again with 10 because it's all shades of blue and grey, which is going to be the colour palatte for the whole thing.


Wait, I lied. There's one more piece - I have to decide whether I'm going to do a border or not. To keep my options open, I went through some of my magazines, and found a simple graphic one that would work. It's a bit thin, is the only thing, but other than that, it should work all right. Plus, I'm just doing this for myself, so if I mess it up, I'm not disappointing anyone else.

My friend suggested starting with the words, so I would know how big the border would need to be, which is good advice. My 'vision' is to have the griffon in the lower-right corner, below the motto, then encase it all in a border. Because of the griffon's colour palette, everything will be done in varying shades of blue and grey.

I'm thinking of making the "I's" of each line a darker shade than the rest. I'm debating whether to do the rest of the motto in a different shade of blue, do blue/grey for each line, or something else.

I may end up stitching the griffon first, just to see what colours are available.

Now that I type all of that out, it strikes me as ridiculously ambitious - lol.

Will that stop me? (Signs point to no.)

I sketched out a rough design (I stole Spawn's crayola felts and scribbled on a page to help with visualsation. As you'll be able to see, my artistic skills are ... well. You'll see ...

 So, what's inspiring you this week?

Inspiration on Monday

 From Trish at http://www.lovelaughterinsanity.com/ comes Inspiration on Monday for all things creative.

I want to start blogging more (it's like the continuous goal - lol) so I'm Making an Effort.

I learned cross-stitch about .... 20-odd years ago, when I was at University. My flatmate taught me, and I had no idea how easy it was because with fiddly creative things (embroidery, knitting etc) I generally have 10 thumbs.

But tiny coloured x's? That I can do!! I have more examples, and in later posts, if I don't get distracted by shinies, I'll talk  about  other projects.

Right now, I'm working on a gift for a friend, who is a huge X Files fan. It's from https://www.etsy.com/nz/shop/pixelsinstitches on etsy.

I used to do a lot of x-stitch for gifts, etc, but now I mostly work on things for myself and as I say to my stitching friend - who works far quicker than me - it's about the journey now, and not the destination.

However, once in a while I have the urge or a reason to work on a gift, hence the pic above.

I have a few I'd like to finish, and I'd also like to get into more fandom stitching. I really want to do a Rivendell chart, but I can't find one. D: And also the Grey Warden's oath from Dragon Age: Origins.

I.... have rambled enough. :-)

Holiday time

I'm on holiday, and this, essentially, is my week. Stitching, a little bit of reading (not as much as I'd hoped) and catching up with AHS: Asylum.

It's a pretty good week all around really. I go back to the salt mines on Monday so I'm making the most of it. :-)

Well, I'd like to be reading a bit more, but apart from that, it's all going all right.

I'm enjoying Asylum, overall. Not as much as I enjoyed the first series, perhaps, and I'm excited for Coven, but there's still a lot to like about Asylum. It's creepy, it has Jessica Lange and Zachary Quinto, so it for sure could be worse.

Also I need to catch up on so many things, so I need to get through some shows on my hard drive.

And then there's Supernatural BUT I CAN'T TALK ABOUT THAT because I'll end up rending my garments and sounding like an over-invested fang-

Wait, never mind.

SUPERNATURAL IS BACK. :DDDDDDDDDD

What I'm Working On

So I was trying to think of something to blog about because it’s been a while and you know, I want to try and do this on a semi-regular basis.

So here’s a (mostly) non-book related post in which I’m going to ramble on a bit about one of my other hobbies that I’ve  mentioned here before – cross stitching.

I’m no kind of artist at all and I can’t do any kind of fancypants embroidery. I can, however, make little x’s with different-coloured threads and make them into a picture.

What can I tell you, I find it soothing – lol.

At the moment I’m working on the one pictured – Circe, which is designed by Jill Oxton after a painting by pre-Raphaelite John Waterhouse.

I’ve been working on it since … 2006 – lol. I’m easily distracted and my house is littered with the ghosts of WIPs past. Last year I decided to try and be a bit organised or somesuch, instead of pretending that all of these half-started projects are magically going to finish themselves.

I’m probably never going to finish them all, I have to be realistic, but I do need to give the ones I have half a shot of finishing a fair go.

H’anyways, the upshot of that ramble is that I instituted a kind of rotation, which is basically choosing a few projects, setting a time limit for working on each, and then moving on to the next … here’s a handy definition guide I found on the interwebz: http://crossstitch.about.com/od/glossa2/g/rotationdefinit.htm

I’ve met myself, so my best bet is to keep it simple. I have three projects in my rotation, including one focus piece. I work on each piece for about 10 hours before switching out, working on the focus piece every second go-round. I hope that makes sense – lol.

So Circe is my focus piece at the moment, and my other two projects are an Impressionist-inspired London at sunset scene, and this really awesome kitchen alphabet. I’ve had them all languishing for years – lol.

I don’t stitch every night – some nights I’m too tired after work/wrangling kid/cooking dinner, etc and some nights I’m far too busy playing bejewelled and plague inc to haul it all out. But I’m trying to make an effort at least a few nights a week because even half an hour can make a difference.

There you have it. Maree’s non-reading hobby #1 J