Why I Hate my Digital Camera...

Reason #1: I can never, and I really mean never, find my frickin' USB cable when I need to upload pictures.

Reason #2: I actually have to have a USB cable to upload my pictures. When I actually do have the damn thing at hand, I feel a bit like I did when I had to use my cassette player to load programs onto my Tandy. The difference of course is that the Tandy was cutting edge for the time and the USB cable seems a bit ridiculous. If there is an alternative, please let me know. I very nearly stomped my camera to bits after looking all over the house for my cable. It is a bit of displaced fury for sure, but it's either stomp the camera or abuse poor Blake. Given that he can fight back, I would surely choose to stomp the poo out of the camera and then just tell him that I lost it and need another one. Sadly, it would be believable...

The reason that I'm so irritated is that I was going to share with you my silly little hobby. I've been into it now for about three years and thankfully my skills have improved a bit since I started out. Drumroll....

I have been doing needlework and I have totally dorked out over it. I started off by stitching up a baby gift for my friend Cindy. At the time, I couldn't think of a good gift and she'd received so much nice stuff by the time my lazy bee-hind got around to doing something for her. So, I got a tip from a coworker about a great needlework shop here in Tulsa and headed over to pick up some supplies.

That project turned out really well, so I kept at it and really found that I enjoyed the craft for a number of reasons. One, it requires a certain level of patience. I don't think I need to elaborate here too much, but I would say that my general self improvement is coming along nicely. Anyway... Two, I've found that in order to stick with needlework, you have to come to appreciate creating the work and avoid focusing on finishing the piece. When I started with this, all I could think about was the final product and how long it would take to finish something. But, as I moved on to more challenging projects, I found that just putting a few stitches in was very satisfying.

I'm including a couple of pictures of my most challenging work to date. This was a baby gift for my friend Jenny's baby girl Caroline who was born in April of 20o6. It was a race to finish this one in time because I grossly underestimated the time it would take to finish it. I kid you not, this one had about ten different shades of beige. I thought I would go completely blind. In the end though, I think that it was worth the work but seriously, I finished the night before I flew out to Seattle to see her and new baby. Whew!

Blurry Photo of the Finished Piece

Detail of Baby in Moses Basket

I wish I had better pictures, because there are some pretty nice little birds on the sides of the basket. The thing that made this project even tougher is that it is stitched on 32 count fabric (I'm pretty sure that is right). This means that there are 32 threads per inch so the holes in the fabric are teeny. Anyway, because they are so tiny, you generally stitch over two holes so that the picture ends up being an appropriate size. However, in order to make the baby in the basket appear as delicate as possible, the face and hands are stitched over one thread. I don't know if you follow, but it was practically impossible for me to stitch the face and hands because my eyes are terrible AND I'm not terribly dextrous. So, much cussing ensued...

Again, this hobby is really teaching me some patience.

Hopefully I will find my USB cable and will be able to upload some images from more recent projects. If not, I will probably smash much of the computer equipment in my house. Stitching has done nothing for my anger issues.