I’m back with a new embroidery:

I’ve never seen Amy Winehouse in real life, but I’m guessing birds could comfortably nest in her giant beehive. Apologies for the bad scan. In real life it looks almost like a graphic design instead of an embroidery. At least until you look at the back:

I’m always curious to see what other embroideries look like on the back. It’s sort of interesting in its own messy, abstract way.

I’ve also got a brand new font. This took an amazingly long time to create because the program I normally use up and decided to start charging me money to use it. So I had do research and download a new program to make this thing, and it took nearly a month to get it finished. So I probably won’t be making too many fonts from now on.

I was going to draw the Queen of Diamonds but I heard she’ll beat you if she’s able. Yes, that really was a "Desperado" reference.

This font also has a lot more characters than the others, so if you ever needed to use the Icelandic alphabet or the IPA symbol for a voiceless palatal fricative, then this is for you!

Þ€ÅÇΣ ØÛ┬

-Sarah

I’ve added six new backgrounds to the site:

I’ve been kind of overwhelmed lately by all the comments and traffic this site has been getting. It’s a little baffling, but thank you, visitors! I’m still crossing my fingers that this site won’t crash in the next three days.

-Sarah

First off I want to thank all the fantastic people who have been linking to this site lately. I’ve been getting so much traffic in the past few days that I had to buy some emergency bandwidth transfer (twice!) to keep this site from closing down. Hopefully I should be good until the end of the month, but in case I’m not, then I’ll see you in March!

I’ve added two new wallpapers to the site:

More backgrounds, a new font, and a new embroidery are all in the works and should be added pretty soon. Until then, please enjoy this picture of the Vancouver Olympics mascot Quatchi squashed onto a scanner.

HAVE A GOOD DAY.

-Sarah

I made this embroidery of Tim Gunn from Project Runway, because really, who doesn’t love Tim Gunn?

I don’t usually do this style of embroidery, but I wanted to try out some redwork. This outline portrait took about a fifth of the time it normally takes me to finish an embroidery, and I think it looks a lot more realistic.

-Sarah

“A portrait is a painting with something wrong with the mouth.”
-John Singer Sargent (1856-1925)

I know I’ve gotten bad at this lately and I only manage to update once a month. I guess I have a ways to go before I become one of those people who become millionaires from blogging. Those people exist, right? All those infomercials at 2 A.M. can’t be made up; everyone in them is always wearing formalwear and drinking champagne next to their hot tubs. Surely TV would never lie to me!

Speaking of TV, here’s another TV-related embroidery. It’s of Tracy Morgan and Kenneth the page from 30 Rock, as Raphael’s angels. I totally love this show. Anyway…

There’s also four new backgrounds that I’ve made and added. I’m pretty fond of that floral even though it’s a little traditional.

Don’t forget to help out Haiti if you have the means.

Yours,
Sarah

I’ve added four new Christmas-colored backgrounds.

There’s also a new PDF of some printable gift tags. They’re free to print and use, though this new batch takes a little longer to load than might be expected. And don’t forget I’ve got plenty of free Christmas stationery, as well.

On a totally unrelated note, a while back I decided that I was going to create something arty and amazing using only MS Paint. For those who have never used this magical program, MS Paint is a horrible pixelly drawing tool that comes free on your PC. It’s also been around for a very long time (I remember running it on Windows 3.1) and unlike so much software, Paint never seems to improve with time. I was planning on making some kind of MS Paint masterpiece, but then I decided that life is probably too short for this crap so I’m going to post what I’ve already done and walk away.

(Clockwise from top left: Stephen Colbert, Shirley Manson, Audrey Tautou [in Amelie], Oprah, Salvador Dali, Marcello Mastroianni, Hugh Laurie [as Dr. House], and Rita Hayworth)

I’ve updated the links at the top of the site to include a link to my Spoonflower fabric shop. I get a small commission on the sale of any of my designs, and there’s 13 patterns available to choose from.

Happy Holidays!

-Sarah

I guess you could call Horse Operas’s music "garage country,"’ but this Arizona-based indie band jumps genres and draws influences from rock, blues, and punk. You can check out the Horse Operas MySpace page for more info. Below you can listen to samples from the CD (my personal favorite is Heart Attack City):

You can buy the CD from CDBaby and iTunes. Also, I know it’s their album and they obviously did all the hard work, but how excited am I that something I drew shows up on iTunes? Thanks for the opportunity, guys!

-Sarah

I’ve added four new backgrounds to the site:

Also, there are two new fonts available to download. One is a 1940s movie throwback, and the other is a creepy looking typeface for Halloween.

Sooo… HAPPY HALLOWEEN, everybody!

-Sarah

It’s been a while since my last update, so I’m adding some extra stuff this time.

Right now California’s unemployment rate is the highest it’s been in 70 years. And so my latest wallpaper features a quote from a Woody Guthrie song written 72 years ago, back when the unemployment numbers were similar.
California is a garden of Eden, A paradise to live in or see; but believe it or not you won’t find it so hot if you ain’t got the do-re-mi.
On a personal note I’ve recently had some good news on the employment front, and my soul-crushing search for work has finally, thankfully, turned up with something. All the best to all those searching for work right now- it’s rough out there but don’t give up.

Also, there’s a lovely new wallpaper featuring birdies. And credit cards. This made more sense in my head than it does on screen but dammit I think I did a kick-ass job drawing those birds. (Is ‘kick-ass’ hyphenated? Does adding proper punctuation to swear words reduce the impact? DAMN IT I am such a nerd).

There are three new backgrounds available:

And now, finally, thanks to the magical wonder of a website called FontCapture, I figured out how to make my own fonts. I’ve been wanting to make fonts for years but I never knew how. So… without further ado, here’s four new typefaces in TrueType format:

All these fonts are free to download and use, even for commercial purposes.
That’s all for today. I’m working on another embroidery so hopefully that will be done soon. Ciao!

-Sarah