Happy Valentime's

I went to a crafting class with some friends this week, and we made Valentine's!

It was very girly, and they even had tiny pink heart-shaped cookies. But it was fun to spend an evening playing with shiny things and eating tiny cookies!

I'm still finding glitter in my belongings because of this one.

It's hard to see here, but this one is embossed - the pink parts are all raised.

String and lace - oooh!

This is the most boring one.

More glitter!

Crafty Congrats

I have always considered myself crafty, but some of our friends really blew me out of the water with their amazing handmade wedding gifts. For instance, these AWESOME putz pillows from the extremely talented Meredith:

I love the flames on the burning man so much I can hardly stand it.

While I thought I had the market cornered on xkcd cross stitching, Alana's sampler of xkcd 943 is absolutely gorgeous:

Look at the flowers! And the rings! And the amazing details in the third panel!

Kathryn made us the best quilt in the entire universe - we can't figure out if we want it on our bed, hanging on the wall, or wrapped around us like a cape at all times:

On the Ben side there is his tail-less dog, the Y combinator, one of his robots, Ben in the CryoFac box, and the hall feed call (you can also see the burning man):


On the Caroline side there is my trombone, ice cream, a Carotini, my flamingo Pete, and the pink dress and chucks I wore to prom (you can also see the chainsaw-wielding marmot):

In the center there is our names as elements (woo, beryllium and calcium!), the burning man and chainsaw marmot you saw above, and the joke 2008 brass rat in amazing detail (you can also see the WaHo crew panel, which is from when Kathryn and I were in high school, and was painted using a real waffle!):

How did I get to be friends with such talented people??

Open source x-stitch-cd

I've had a few requests for a pattern for my xkcd cross-stitch, and while I (sadly) don't have pattern-making software, I was able to get a somewhat decent scan of the pattern I drew:

• Top half
• Bottom half
• Ball pit (This part was just a randomly generated matrix of R/G/B/Y, thanks MATLAB!) To make the top row of balls look wavy, I alternated 3/4 stitches with full stitches and blanks, so the top row was like /X\_/X\_/X\_/X\

I used 18-count white aida cloth, and 2 strands of floss for pretty much everything - the exception being fine things (like the hair on the female stick figures) and pale lettering (like "internet" and "outernet"), which I did with 1 strand. In addition to black, I used the following colors:

• DMC 3046 (medium yellow beige) for the map of the internet, bakery rolls, and trees
• DMC 304 (medium red) for the sheets, spider, cape, skateboard, roller coaster, and red balls
• DMC 444 (darl lemon) for the yellow balls
• DMC 702 (kelly green) for the green balls
• DMC 826 (medium blue) for the blue balls
• DMC 647 (medium beaver gray) for the transistor

The finished product was about 9" x 12" - which was quite convenient for framing purposes.

Hope that helps any nerdy cross-stitchers out there!

A Beautiful Map

We had this great idea at work to buy a giant map of Philadelphia, put it on the wall, and mark all of the schools where we have teachers. Then we thought it would be even better to put all of the teachers' names along with their schools, but they didn't quite fit so we thought it would be cute to connect names and schools using color-coded strings:

While we were successful in our aim, the unintentional result is that it kind of looks like the work of a paranoid schizophrenic.

THE KEY TO CLOSING THE ACHIEVEMENT GAP IS DESTROYING THE NETWORK OF SPY SATELLITES THE CIA IS USING TO CONTROL OUR THOUGHTS THROUGH SMARTBOARDS.