Bob DuCharme is turning into a major craft-info source for me! He pointed me to this great collection of photos on Flickr related to Rosey Grier’s notable needlepoint career. The poster, Extreme Craft, has some more great photos here. I especially like the Mahogany Coke Bottle and the “Great Item” at Wal-Mart.
It’s refreshing that most of the Rosey Grier designs aren’t hackneyed — though the “Love/heart” one is pretty ripe. I guess there was a law in the 1970’s that required all needlepointers to do at least one piece like that. My mom gave me some of her old 60’s and 70’s stitching pieces at some point; I wish I’d taken a picture of one particular “Love/heart” specimen before getting rid of it (with her permission, I assure you) in my cross-country move because it had a, well, let’s call it a Yellow Submarine-like quality that’s hard to find today.
In related news, I’ve finally acquired a base design for my XML 2005 conference piece — I bought a pattern from a designer on the Internet who seems quite talented. I bought a whole kit from her so I could get started quickly, and to that end the designer also kindly provided Hobbyware Pattern Maker files. Over the weekend I managed to figure out where to situate my own text (XML-related, of course!) in place of the original, using a special stitched font that she also provided. Using stitched fonts is really fun; I tend to do a lot of kerning and other spacing by eye, and you’d be surprised how effective this can be when most of the letters are practically dot-matrix-simple, say 5 dots wide by 6 dots high.
Only the intersection of people out there who really care about both XML and cross-stitching will find it funny that one of the Pattern Maker file extensions is .xsd…
