Waits Family Annals

After my birthday, it was hard to celebrate Mother’s Day. I didn’t know what I could do that would “top” Liz’s plans. I also don’t think that’s necessarily the right way to look at celebrations; they are not a quid pro quo, they are not equal, etc. But the pressure was still on.

A couple weeks before Mother’s Day, I uploaded a picture and ordered a frame from Hatchcraft. I was excited about it. Simple, but eloquent. I thought it said everything about Liz as a Mother. Unfortunately, I did not realize they had just started the service, and my frame would not be ready for a couple weeks. This meant I would not have anything ready for Liz on Mother’s Day. Eek!

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A Christmas/Birthday present for my sister-in-law over at Waits4theBus– I decided to make an epic cross-stitch of Krang from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. After completing the Mega Man project in June, I started looking around for a video game based cross-stitch pattern. I LOVE Sprite Stitch and Stitch Please for inspiration. As I was looking through various video game patterns, I was leaning toward a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle theme. Rather than use a pattern created by others, I wanted to do a Todd Waits original. I started looking for sprites used in TMNT video games from the NES and SNES. I found a good resource that I have since forgotten, and found a sprite of Krang. I new exactly what I wanted at that point! I grabbed another sprite of a dialog box saying “Tonight I Dine on Turtle Soup,” and used Photoshop to combine the images. I then used PCStitch Pro to convert the gif into a cross-stitch pattern with corresponding DMC floss colors, and created what has to be one of the coolest patterns EVAR!

Before I even started working on the actual stitching in September, I knew that I was not going to keep this for myself. My sister-in-law loves the TMNT, and I knew this was going to be her Christmas/Birthday present (they are the same day) from me. The whole pattern came out to about 8 x 14 inches. It was big, but so much fun. I really slacked off in October and November. For the first two weeks of December, I essentially watched movies and cross-stitched in order to finish in time. Every time I would finish an identifiable section, I would get so excited and think how much Wendy was going to LOVE it. I also couldn’t wait to post it online, but had to wait until after Christmas otherwise ruin the surprise. So Christmas has come and gone. She loved the gift, and I quote from Twitter: “@DarkYodeler Wow. That’s all I gotta say. Cross stitch has made it to a whole new level for me.”

Enjoy a full res shot and printable pattern after the jump:

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All right! After a good day’s labor, Mega Man finally hangs on our walls! He is in the Baby’s Room guarding those around him. I woke up the other morning, and was thinking about the cut-out of the Duck Hunt Dog. The nice thing about video game sprites is each pixel can be very easy to translate  to recreate on any grid. So I decided to make one of my own. We already have a Duck Hunt light switch, and Mario Decals everywhere else, so we wanted something other than Mario. Mega-Man it is.

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I decided to have a “Martha Stewart” Halloween this year. My friend Jeanne has some patterns for Halloween cats, and we also wanted to put some tombestones up. This is really a fun holiday to make silly thngs, and of course what is halloween without honoring THE BEST vampire show ever created???

Our Buffy tombstone reads: Buffy Anne Summers / 1981-2001 / She Saved the World… A Lot. Of course, everyone recognizes that tombstone and inscription from the fifth season finale. If you don’t recognize this, maybe you have your own tombstone.

The other two tombstones refer to the first big bad. Count Dracula’s lists each year he has allegedly been killed.

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