The Cross Stitch World Championship

Imagine that! I never wrote an update about my first Steotchalong experience... and I've now completed two of them! I'm sensing a theme here. Let's recap. Sorry, this is going to get long...

Many thanks to Matt & Em Fitzpatrick of Steotch.com for all the hard work they put into this incredible endeavor!

Steotchalong 6 (Fall 2018)

After eight weeks and many meetups, the Steotch-aritas finished their group and individual projects!

Well, mostly. I finished one of my two, but I really love how it turned out.

The "spooky" challenge.

My Steotchalong voted with me!

My finished piece.

Detail of my custom finish. Complete with cat hair.

In the frame! Float frames are my favorite.

And our ridiculous group project.


Steotchalong 7 (Late Summer 2019)

We loved our 2018 group stitch so much that it became our team name and logo for Steotchalong 7! 


This last go-around was even more intense than the previous year, and we tried as hard as we could to participate in all the challenges. We were competitive for a couple weeks, but then fell behind as the time requirements for the challenges (and the seemingly endless free time the other teams had?) got a little out of hand. 

The first challenge involved creating a team drink. We ended up with "Crotch Water". Yes, there's another theme here... and it's kind of weird, but we kind of had to be weird to keep up. 


We were also issued a bunch of weird scenarios to photograph our WIPs; like "wear your WIP on your head while playing air guitar for an audience". I had my husband take a picture of me "riding public transit while working on my WIP wearing a headlamp". I hopped on a pedal pub as it was just leaving for its tour of the bar district. 


Other challenges included a Photoshop contest using images from a 90s cross stitch sweater book, a repurposing challenge in which we were asked to create something new out of a found piece of stitching, and a public art piece (which directly inspired our group stitch for this year...), among plenty others. 

In honor of the late Grumpy Cat. Also my mood at the time.

Our official extra weird entry. Barbie's nether region made another appearance.

My unfinished thrift purchase.

The finish was a little inappropriate (NSFW).

Our attempt at public art got us kicked out of the Titletown District (we didn't have a permit).

Our finished group stitch, inspired by the above.

And all of those challenges were on top of the actual stitching project! There's a reason they call it the Cross Stitch World Championship. The floss list alone included a whopping 60 colors and seemingly 5 billion blends. (!)


I have no idea how, but someone guessed the theme AND the source image JUST FROM SEEING THE COLORS! This was someone's overlay of the very first pattern drop. 

HOW THO??

Obviously, we stitched the Golden Girls. Lots of people were mad or disappointed or just grumpy, either about the fact that the surprise was "ruined" and/or that it was the Golden Girls. It caused more drama than anticipated... but I had fun with it and it really challenged my skills. The pattern was much more intense than last year's, which I think also scared a lot of people off. I had never worked with blends and quarter stitches before, and it truly did turn out to be a work of art. 

My early WIP came out for a beer release party.

Don't ask. We get weird when we get together.

Creepy faceless Girls. (see above)

Dorothy and Sophia are looking good!

The Girls are finished!

And of course, we were offered many options to finish our pieces, but I ended up designing my own again. I also designed one for one of my team mates that turned out pretty funny. I guess we're both feeling a little bit old these days? 

I like my bananas with tan spots, but Rose is my favorite and this quote made me laugh.


Oh... one last thing. Em asked us to send in all of our ORTS (the little bits of leftover thread), so I made a special envelope for ours. Think she knew who it was from? 

Yes... perhaps we took the theme too far. But, when in Rome!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Football Blanket Crochet Chart

Image
Here is the chart I worked off of for the football blanket... it is sized for a baby afghan, about 36 by 48 inches, but the chart can be easily modified to make it bigger. I worked the entire blanket in double crochet, and the white laces in the center were made with the tapestry stitch, in which the color not being used is carried across the top of the work and the stitches are made over it, concealing the color. Here's a pretty good tutorial for the tapestry stitch, although as I stated earlier, I did all double crochet for this project, but the concept is the same. For this particular blanket, I used five balls of Bernat Waverly yarn in brown, and almost a whole skein of Red Heart Super Saver in white for the lines and laces. I believe I used a size J hook, which made the project go nice and quick. Adjust the size of yarn and hook to fit your needs- everyone crochets differently! Happy crocheting! :) Update: if you love this football blanket, check out my football...
Read more

Temperature Record Cross Stitch

Image
I tried telling people years ago that cross stitch was cool again... and I WAS RIGHT! Pay no attention to the random pet hairs... I'm in this crazy cross stitch group on Facebook that features non-traditional subject matter, from naughty words to feminist themes to potty humor and beyond. While I don't consider it my style to be crass or subversive, I do appreciate the modern approach to a very old craft that is normally associated with "grannies" (not that there's anything wrong with that, either). This group has introduced me to a variety of interesting new project ideas, including the concept of a temperature stitch. Essentially, each day's high and low temperature are recorded in different colored stitches to provide a really interesting visual of our climate and seasons. This whole idea has my head spinning around ways to physically represent climate change in artsy-crafty form by going through the last hundred years and stitching a huge collecti...
Read more

Kaffe Fassett Jelly Roll Jam Quilt

Image
Here it is! I tried something new with this quilt, and I'm not sure I was 100% successful. The binding was unusual for me. I normally do the whole 2.5" strip, hand-sewn binding thing, but I wanted to try using the backing as the binding this time to keep it simple. I LOVE this backing fabric ; it's so soft, and it tied in so nicely with the color scheme of the Kaffe Fassett "Tides" jelly roll. I have noticed though, that this particular fabric shows a lot of poke holes, so be careful with pin placement and try to get your seams right the first time around. I worked really hard to turn my edges under nicely and pin well, at least every 2 inches. Unfortunately, as I kind of  suspected, some of the loose ends bulged out in between the pins as my presser foot went over them. Now that I've washed the quilt, I can see that I need to do some seam ripping to fix a lot of little peeks of batting and frayed edged. Sad face. I also noticed tha...
Read more