Current Projects

Okay, I currently have two projects going, which I hope to have some kind of payoff in the long run.

The first is of the kind that can move quickly, but be kinda boring during the run of it. An online-only friend of mine does work with iron-fuse beads, and has a lot of fun making coasters and figures using 8-64-bit characters and items from older video games. I've been working on getting some designs together that would fit the coaster size, using paw prints, various kanji, and cross stitch and beading patterns. The hardest part of this is trying to get the designs into a 22x22 or 23x23 area, and nothing larger, as this roughly translates to a 4x4-inch block.

My main thing is getting all the graphs done before I buy the beads, so I can figure out how many beads of each color I need. Part of me just wants to go and buy 2 of X colors, and 6 of white (which is the main background for most of the graphs), but my worry is that I'll run through them too fast. So, trying to get the graphs done first.

The second project I'm working on is a needlepoint design of my own doing, which I hope to have done in time for the State Fair. This being a compass rose that I'm currently entering in my bead graph program. Given how it's going so far, I fear this may turn out for the 2011 State Fair, instead of this fall, but we'll see what happens. I'm currently laying out the basic compass, and will be adding details after I'm done with that. The bad news is, the way the Beading program is (this being the 2.0 version), I have to do the design in four segments, each 180x180 beads. Since the fabric I have is 10 stitches per inch, this basically translates into a 18"x18" area, or one quarter of the 3'x 3' design. Which is what the fabric is.

And thinking of that, the fabric is exactly 36.5", so i may have just shot myself in the proverbial foot by making the design just that little bit too big. ^^;