The Best and the Worst in One Post

Not many people are as blessed as I am to have a best friend like I do. My Jean is indescribably wonderful. She and I have been friends since we were in diapers and we share a closeness that is really rare.

But I'm not saying this to brag. That would be weird. I'm saying this because I'm updating on the project that I designed for her. Her son's paternal step-grandmother is a nice lady and a huuuuge Disney nut. She's also rather wealthy and difficult to shop for. So every year Jean and I try to come up with some handmade Disney project to make for her for Christmas. Year before last was appliqued potholders, last year was a scarf, this year is a cross stitched banner that Jean and I are actually both going to be working on.

I designed it using coricamo.com and then since I couldn't figure out a way to get the thing to center justify, I copied it all over in Microsoft Excel so that I could manipulate that.

Coricamo.com, by the way, is awesome. So happy with it. It made this so easy! And the fonts available made the end design a lot more fun looking than it might otherwise have been.

Wrinkles. Many wrinkles.

This picture gives zero sense of scale. I think this thing measures like 28" long or so.

This is stitched 2x1 on an 18 count white opalescent aida. The sparklies are hard to see but they are there. And they are the only reason I went with aida.

Which reminds me, I need to rant about aida. I haaaaate it! Hate! It is so stiff and bulky and cumbersome and rough and basically the worst. How anyone can prefer it to an evenweave like lugana is quite beyond my capability to understand. There are absolutely no upsides to aida.  You sit there and try to bring your needle up through the back and it resists you at every turn. The fabric is so dense that it won't let the needle poke up so you can orient yourself to get it through the right hole. That makes it sound more complicated than it really is. It's more of a process that you do without thinking. But that's the thing! With aida you suddenly are thinking about it precisely because it won't allow you to let it happen naturally. Stupid, hateful aida.

Those letters took much longer to stitch than they ought to have. I started it on May 16th and just passed it off to Jean on June 4th.

It will eventually read:

In this house

we let it go

because hakuna matata

and the bare necessities

will always be our guide

to infinity and beyond.

All it takes is faith, trust,

and a little bit of pixie dust

while we just keep swimming.

We whistle while we work.

We believe in happy endings

and we know that

life is always better under the sea.

Because in this house

we do Disney.