{"id":221,"date":"2011-01-02T05:49:09","date_gmt":"2011-01-02T05:49:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artificialinanity.wordpress.com\/?p=55"},"modified":"2016-02-12T16:14:05","modified_gmt":"2016-02-12T21:14:05","slug":"holiday-crafts-and-a-companion-cube","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheldon-hess.org\/coral\/2011\/01\/holiday-crafts-and-a-companion-cube\/","title":{"rendered":"Holiday crafts and a Companion Cube"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was pretty busy in the months leading up to the holidays. I have oodles of pictures of the many, many cookies we made to ship off to family, but I haven’t gone through those yet, to post them. What I did finally go back to look at (and, in one case, to censor, because there are a few people I’d prefer not to offend (and lots more I don’t mind offending, but why go out of my way?)) were the photos of the cross-stitch projects I completed. I’m rather proud of myself for getting these finished, though the one project was not completed in time for Christmas, and I was too impatient to wait until Valentine’s Day to present it to my husband.<\/p>\n

This is a cross stitch I made for my mom, from the Subversive Cross Stitch<\/a> book (they don’t censor). It does a good job of expressing many of my family members’ feelings about the holiday season.
\n\"Happy<\/a><\/p>\n

I also took a picture of the backing, because that’s where the artistry is, in cross stitch. (I mean, yes, you should make sure all your stitches happen in the same direction [left-to-right on bottom, right-to-left on top — or vice versa, in my case], try not to twist the thread, and try to keep your tension even–still working on that last one. But definitely make sure the back is as neat as possible!) I’d love to know, from a more experienced stitcher, whether or not I’m doing this right.
\n\"Backing<\/a><\/p>\n

This was the first subversive cross stitch I made, and I sent it to my brother’s wife, because I thought it would fit in pretty well with the other decorations in her house–there’s a lot that’s funny\/snarky there. :) I hope she liked it and agreed that it fit in; it’s always a little dodgy, giving people decorative things.
\n\"Whatever\"<\/a><\/p>\n

And this is a Weighted Companion Cube that I made for my husband. You know that terrible plastic stuff that’s like cross stitch fabric, but bigger and intended to be “cross stitched” with yarn—it was popular for making tissue box covers in the ’70s or ’80s? I inherited some, not long ago (along with a book about how to make tissue box covers out of them—keep your eyes open for a Tardis tissue box, sometime in the future ;)), and it occurred to me that, rather than just cross stitching something Portal-themed<\/a>, which was my original plan, I could actually make him a physical cube he could put on his desk.
\n\"Home-made<\/a><\/p>\n

I used the same counts, in making my cube, as the pattern at the blog post I linked. And then I just had to stick with the project long enough to make six sides—btw, I’ve got the pattern memorized, now—and stitch them together. To get it to be deceptively heavy, I used sushi rice and pennies, in a plastic bag, inside of the cube. It seems to have worked pretty excellently.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was pretty busy in the months leading up to the holidays. I have oodles of pictures of the many, many cookies we made to ship off to family, but I haven’t gone through those yet, to post them. What I did finally go back to look at (and, in…<\/p>\n

Continue readingHoliday crafts and a Companion Cube<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":224,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-221","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-crafts","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheldon-hess.org\/coral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheldon-hess.org\/coral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheldon-hess.org\/coral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheldon-hess.org\/coral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheldon-hess.org\/coral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=221"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheldon-hess.org\/coral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheldon-hess.org\/coral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/224"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheldon-hess.org\/coral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=221"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheldon-hess.org\/coral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=221"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheldon-hess.org\/coral\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=221"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}