#( % : cross me * thread )

[swiftfootedachilles]

camo jacket, robbing corner stores

hard odds to beat when you're on all fours

words from Crush by Ethel Cain | pattern and embroidery by me

[findingschmomo]

Dragon quest xi my beloved, one day ill finish you

[pocket-elf]

Kellin Quinn, Madness

2 thread cross stitch on 18ct aida

[leadendeath-art]

tiny project (didnt time it, but way under 1hr) in-between the one billion other projects

so easy to translate pixel art to cross stitch, a blessing!

[kindahoping4forever]

5SOS: North America, seein you next week. Spicier than ever.

[soullessseraphim]

So I just randomly decided to do that and...

I think it look pretty cool! It's the first cross stitch I ever finished ; although fear not, I am not giving up art or animation at all (well animation that's a big word,, didn't progress on my summer's project much bc of mood and other factors ; idk if it's a seasonal depression or smth like that or maybe regular depression it kind of feels like it whatever I'm lacking some sleep and I'm yapping sorry)! Merely having hobbies and it's... It's great, actually, it's amazing

^ also tried to censor the micro vent here,, so like you don't have to read the crossed out part if you don't want to

Anyway have a nice day or night 🧡 thank you for looking at my ramblings

[bucky-boychik-barnes]

so the cataloguing of my aunt's thread is taking longer than expected for what should be obvious reasons

[mossbegreen]

Got told by a friend the back of my stitching is eerily neat so I thought I'd share

This is the front of the design

And this is the back

It's a sweater I bought that had cross-stitch flowers printed onto it so I've made it my goal to physically stitch them on cause it just looks way nicer

[zhongscara]

honestly so funny how wriolette is the only hoyo mandated yaoi im attached to in any way. how did they get my ass. (its playing with the attack dog symbolism/trope thats what

[tuulikki]

Spring is craft season

(Pattern here)

[kashilascorner]

Oh ok. I get now why a lot of people didn't vibe with the ending.

All and all: excellent manga, overall very good final act, too rushed final 2-3 chapters but weak and honestly mediocre epilogue, which makes the high of the ending kind of leave a bitter taste. I think Noda had a good steed and suddenly he had to finish and had to rush all. So the ending in the sense of the final arc was good but the ending proper (final couple chapters) + epilogue......... Not so much

[love-fireflysong]

May everyone one day find the cat/pet that is just happy to chill on your lap, absolutely unbothered by all the thread and shifting fabric going on literally right on top of their head nonstop.

[mxnordberg]

hi!! i love your cross stitch pieces so so so much. would you ever consider releasing patterns?

I write all over my patterns so I don't really have any of the ones that I've used in the past, unfortunately! But luckily cross-stitch (the way I do it at least) is more an effort of hundreds of hours of work and not necessarily a lot of creativity so I can tell you how I make them!

The website pic2pat is a blessing -- that's what I use to generate the patterns. For the first handful I did, I just did a lot of random guesswork on the size and didn't do any kind of editing on the screenshot before I uploaded it. For the first Impurity hoop and the Isolation hoop, I just sort of did my best to square up the image in the center and didn't worry about filling it out to the edges at all. For the Decay and Extraction and Memories hoops, I did the same thing only I made the pattern a lot bigger than my hoop size and just kind of did a bunch of estimation to make the image fill out the hoop as a circle the way I wanted it to. It's less work on the front-end, but then when you go to actually start stitching you have to do a LOT of double-checking and counting squares on your cloth to figure out where the elements are going to wind up, which can be very rough lol.

Lately, I've decided that's annoying so I've actually taken the time to measure my hoops exactly, and then I'll make a square canvas in procreate, drop the screenshot in there and get it to fill the square the way I want it to (depending on the screenshot, you might have to do some drawing here -- the totheark videos are shot in a rectangular aspect ratio, so trying to put them in a square can lead to either cropping out some details or leaving gaps at the top and bottom. I've usually been erring on the side of including all the details I want and then going in to paint in an extension of the top/bottom of the frame so it'll fill out the whole circle. I usually try to aim for some level of photo-realism, but you do lose some image quality when you convert it to stitching, so you don't have to get Too hung up on it), and then draw a circle over top to use as a reference for where the hoop is. Then you can upload that image to the pic2pat site and have the pattern generated the exact size of the hoop so you wind up doing less counting/guesswork.

For the colors, I usually start at the bottom with the least amount and pay close attention to the level of detail that I'm looking for. Depending on the size of your hoop, the amount of thread you need can quickly become a little absurd so I do usually try to cap it at around 14 colors since you often need multiple skeins of thread per color -- lately I've been aiming for fewer to save money.

THEN once you download the pattern you can mark out the the horizontal/vertical center row (the patterns generate the number of rows on the side, so that's relatively easy), and then I'll do the same for the actual hoop (a little harder, since you have to actually measure stuff, although honestly I mostly eyeball it lol). Then you can get started!

The important thing with cross-stitching like this though is that you're Going to miscount things. I don't go stitch by stitch like a knitting pattern because I imagine keeping multiple active threads in the same row from tangling/getting stitched to the cloth would be a nightmare. instead, I usually pick a color and will work by only filling in those stitches all over the hoop. You're almost certainly going to miscount the number of squares here and there and wind up throwing off the entire pattern because you filled in a bunch of sections in the entirely wrong place. The fact that the pattern generates on multiple pages can kind of exacerbate this since you might miscount rows between pages (although you can print them out and cut the edges out to tape the page together so it aligns in an actual single square). Usually this isn't all that big of a deal honestly -- because you fill out every single square, a lot of the time this is equivalent of being off by a few Pixels, so it's not very noticeable. Sometimes I do pull it up, but mostly I just go back in and mark off the squares on the pattern that I filled in 'wrong' and then will rework the pattern Around those stitches to move things back into place sort of.

I wish I was better at taking WIP images so I could actually show you what I mean, but hopefully this was enough to sort of give you an idea of what I'm talking about lol. And a few jumping off points.

[tadpal]

but seriously if you're taking inspiration from emma for your story/characterisation and you DONT make them good friends who seek eachother out constantly . then you've simply missed the point

[dragonballnewstar]

// Confession: I have no idea how to ship with canon characters...

We've had characters ~play~ with canons but very rarely had an actual relationship. So... I struggle trying to pitch for ships. Like, pitch in general but very much with canon characters

[pippin-pippout]

Ok so I’m caught up on the this woven kingdom series. I HATED the blood oath bit. I understand it’s supposed to make us uncomfortable but it feels super unforgivable and disgusting on Alizeh’s part. And during the oath, she was like “I didn’t realize it would be this bad” yet she still didn’t turn back when she had the chance. And after it was done she still had the nerve to be surprised by how bad it was still going to get.

Maybe as someone who has suffered from chronic illnesses it disgusts me to see a supposedly heroic character knowingly condemn someone to suffer constant endless pain. Or maybe it’s because I really don’t think she HAD to have the blood oath in order to marry him. He would’ve given the kingdom to her no matter what and probably killed himself if she’d asked. And while I understand that she can’t trust him fully, she had a choice to make - 1) take a risk, trust, and don’t enslave someone, or 2) enslave someone and operate risk free.

In reality (and in most fantasy stories) people are forced to operate with risk. They take chances to get what they want. Because of the existence of the blood oath she didn’t have to take a risk, but she still could’ve chosen to do so, in order to spare someone who she knows didn’t deserve it even more unimaginable pain.

Even beyond that, she wouldn’t have been taking as much risk as a normal person, because she had the nosta when Cyrus was making his promises initially. So she knew he had the full intent at the time to fulfill his end of the bargain. She knows the devil plans for her to be queen, so she doesn’t actually have to fear the devil forcing Cyrus to change his mind, nor the devil making Cyrus hurt/kill her (which I’m still not convinced the blood oath protects her from given Cyrus also has a deal with the devil).

Ultimately, the narrative was set up like the blood oath was a requirement for the marriage. There were only two options: either blood oath + marriage or no marriage at all. To someone like Kamran, I can see how that would be an all or nothing situation. But there was also the option of marriage with no blood oath. It kind of ruined Alizeh’s character for me that she never even bothered to consider that option. She chose to enslave someone to herself and to condemn them to constant pain.

The only saving grace is that what she wants is to save her people, and I can understand the argument of not wanting to leave other people’s fates up to chance if you don’t have to. But to me, to condemn one person to that kind of suffering when there were other options available - other good options that provided more assurance than any normal person would ever get - should completely disqualify her from being any kind of savior Queen.

Edit because I’m not done: I also thought it really disgusting that she basically acted out Cyrus’s dreams as his “angel” in the last chapter, but instead of comforting him after the devil tortured him, in this case the torture was completely brought on by her. Yet the last line of the book is her blaming the devil.

And while he certainly has a part to play in Cyrus being forced to marry her it wasn’t him that demanded the blood oath that causes Cyrus’s current suffering. I’m pretty confident this parallel was intentional on the author’s part, including Alizeh ironically being the source of his suffering this time, but I don’t know what I was meant to take away from it. She was very much framed as a villain to me in that last chapter though I don’t think that was the authors intention at all.

Also I’m not sure if Cyrus’s prior dreams of her were actually the devil’s doing or him seeing a version of the future (since diviners can do that) in a way that comforted him. But either way the way it actually came true was for her to mend the hurts she willingly caused him while he is desperate for her like an opioid. It took any sense of romance out of that for me. Him not wanting her to leave after he’s tortured by the devil because she is a comforting loving presence? Sweet. Him not wanting her to leave because her absence will literally cause him unbearable pain and he doesn’t have faith she’ll stick around just to prevent that? Disturbing.