I’ve finally finished this embroidery. It’s been staring at me (and pretty intently, for an inanimate object) for weeks and I sewed the last bit up this afternoon.

It’s Dwight Schrute from "The Office," whose character owns a beet farm. There’s a scarcity of Schrute related art. Why, friends?

I’ve also made a new font, named after a fort built in 1839 in my hometown of Sacramento. Because, well, why not?

Have a lovely Tuesday!

-Sarah

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 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

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

It’s called "Emperor Commodus Finds Something Better to do with his Thumbs." It’s supposed to look reasonably like Joaquin Phoenix in the movie Gladiator, but much like the real Joaquin Phoenix, this embroidery turned out to be difficult to work with. In the movie, Emperor Commodus gets to decide whether a gladiator lives or dies by pointing his thumbs up or down, so I figure he should use his thumbs for good instead of evil and just hitchhike to San Francisco.
He’d fit in in San Francisco. He’s already kind of has flowers in his hair, and historically the city has been tolerant of crazy, self-proclaimed emperors.

Sorry for the kind of lame picture of it- it’s 10 inches across (my largest embroidery yet) and it won’t fit on my scanner.

So there you have it.

-Sarah

I’ve made another embroidery, this time of Mr. Bean on a can of beans.

I think S&W brand beans are sold only on the West Coast, but that isn’t to say that the brand doesn’t somehow manage to get around the world.
I haven’t seen Mr. Bean on TV lately, except on Telemundo. This works out well enough, because very little is lost in the translation to Spanish.

-Sarah

I’ve created another embroidery. This is what it would look like if Dr. House (from the TV show House) took Vicodin (as he often does) then fell asleep and dreamed that he was in Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

What can I say? Some people handle unemployment better than others.

Oh, and seriously WTF with Amber’s ghost reappearing? The writers of House really deserve a gold star for the wacky stuff they think up.

I also made a wallpaper featuring feral versions of famous furniture. In college I was required to take a class in interior design (for reasons that are not entirely clear to me), and it left me with the ability to identify the name, designer, and year of creation of many chairs. This bizarre talent really amused my friends and family, and so for months they pointed out chairs for me to identify. I would call out the answers:

Eames Lounge, Charles and Ray Eames, 1956!
Selene Chair, Vico Magistretti, 1969!
Bistro Chair, Micheal Thonet, 1859!

Most of these facts have fallen out of my head by now. Recently I was looking up to see the prices of some of these chairs that I had to memorize, and all of them are wildly expensive. Perhaps one lucky day I will stumble upon a garage sale of some foolish person who doesn’t know the true price of a 50 year old plastic chair, and then all this knowledge will have served me some practical purpose.

Anyway, please enjoy this preview of an angry Eames lounge. RAWR.

-Sarah

P.S. If you leave a comment here, please don’t include the word “Vicodin” because my spam filter will eat it.

I’ve been delayed in posting this, but I finished yet another embroidery.

It took a little over two skeins of orange thread to make the background. Since I split up the strands of thread, that’s over 100 feet of orange in an eight inch embroidery.

I gave an interview over at Feeling Stitchy last week, and I was also profiled a while back in the Mr X Stitch blog.
The nice folks over at Gallery Hanahou also sent me a copy of the February issue of the Village Voice, and my name is in it! I’ve been printed!

I haven’t posted many graphics in a while, so hopefully I’ll get some new ones up soon.
-Sarah

Since I’ve been doing a lot of embroidery lately, I decided that I’d make some embroidery patterns. A lot of embroidery patterns are a little on the cutesy side, so I decided I’d make some that are more current. Enter the internet memes.

Now you can Rickroll your hand towels!

These are embroidery patterns of internet memes. There’s a lolcat, the skateboarding dog, the ORLY owl, the dramatic chipmunk/gopher, and Rick Astley. This pattern sheet is for personal use only, and since I’m not sure who owns the copyrights of each meme it’s probably better you don’t sell anything you make with these.

The full size PDF is available (for free, of course) here. 

There was a strange little snag in my plans though, and within minutes of posting these patterns on Flickr (minutes, I tell you!) I discovered that the lovely user kittyzilla not only thought of embroidering internet memes first, but also made a whole quilt of them! You can take a look at her (nearly) completed quilt, and if nothing else you have to see the amazing likeness she made of the dramatic chipmunk/gopher.

This is not the first time I have stumbled unwittingly onto the same artistic path as someone else.

After I posted my Price is Right embroidery, I came across an artist named Rob Conger who also was inspired by the show. He created a large woven rug of the famous wheel back in 1999, proving that I am definitely not the first to depict the game show using thread.
Also, back in January I posted some free stickers of happy faces that I hoped people would stick on every object they owned. Browsing the internet one day, I came across a post at the blog Color Me Katie that encourages the same kind of ridiculous behavior.

And lastly, when looking around for interesting posters to buy, I found that the Polish poster for the movie Fatal Attraction bears a strange resemblance to a background I posted a while back.

Maybe I am over-thinking these things.
-Sarah

The quote comes from one of my favorite Simpsons episodes. Here’s the context:

Milhouse: I hate these flood pants. [opens door and water comes in up to his ankles] Hey, they’re working! My feet are soaked, but my cuffs are bone dry! Everything’s coming up Milhouse!

Also, my Dr. Phil embroidery will be for sale for a few more days from here.

HAVE A NICE DAY.
-Sarah