I am going to give my thoughts on the Avengers time to percolate until it's out in the US and I can't perpetrate accidental spoilers. But I think it's fair to say that the capslock of squee will be out in force for that entry. I'm off to see it again tonight in fact. It's that good. But I'll shut up now.

Instead, I'll post a little piece of Thor and Loki craftage that I made ages ago and kept forgetting to post until now. I think this is officially Geek Lamp 3: <Insert terrible Asgardian pun here.>


( More pics... )
This entry was originally posted at http://anonymityblaize.dreamwidth.org/62636.html.

So, I totally failed to post these pics of my finished Leslie Knope cross stitch on Friday, but here I am now. I am still suffering from cultural over stimulus (otherwise known as the curse of "too many awesome things") and I don't think I'm going to calm down any time soon seeing as I'm already bouncing off the walls from the excitement of seeing the Avengers tomorrow. I am beyond giddy.

But I'll try to keep calm long enough to share Leslie with the world. I can't remember right now how big the stitched design is but the frame is an A4 one to give you some context. There's just the four colours of thread and she took a little over 3 weeks to stitch. If anyone wants the pattern just let me know and I'll edit it in. There should be a Ron Swanson piece to go with it sometime soon I hope! (If my current levels of squee don't cause me to spontaneously combust!) (This post has too many exclamation points!!!11!!!eleventy!!)

So here she is! (!!!)

A few years ago Mister Blaize and I made a decision to get those nifty Cineworld unlimited cards. It's turned out to be a very smart decision financially, considering how many movies we go see. But it does occasionally lead to crazypants decisions like going to the cinema three times in the space of a week, the same week as we also went to see a Cirque du Soleil show. So my brain entirely melted from cultural over stimulus and I had to hide with a duvet over my head.

They were four very different experiences though, and I feel like I ought to be able to write a post on each one, but my blogging-fu has weakened due to lack of use of late, so the 100 things challenge is a very well timed bandwagon for me to jump upon. I think I'm going to do 100 things that I get ridiculously overenthusiastic about, and break it down into tens - 10 songs, 10 books , 10 movies etc. etc. Join me, won't you?




{Take the 100 Things challenge!}

So, some brief thoughts on my week of too many things, as a warm up exercise.

Cirque's Alegria was as stunning as Cirque shows always are. Especially a pair of female contortionists who were so flipping bendy I sometimes was confused about what body part was where. On the cinema front, Headhunters was totally not what I was expecting, in a totally good way. It's a Norwegian thriller co-starring that dude who plays Jamie Lannister in Game of Thrones with that name I can't spell and can't be arsed to google right now. If you like a good art-crime/chase movie then see it if you can. Battleship on the other hand, I'd avoid like the plague. It makes the Transformer movies look like masterpieces. It really is as bad as the reviews are saying. I love me some Taylor Kitsch and Alexander Skarsgaard and it wasn't even worth it for them. Rihanna (Riannha? Rhianna? Another name I can't be done with spell checking.) was the best thing about this movie, and put in a performance actually resembling a human being, unlike any one else, which was really weird. Also, this a movie about ships that doesn't actually understand how water works which is beyond distracting. I went in with low expectations and was still disappointed, that is how bad this film is. I suffered, you shouldn't have to. And then at the other end of the spectrum was Cabin in the Woods - probably the most fun I've had in the cinema in a good long while. It wasn't as scary as I'd expected (I went in pretty blind, which is how I'd recommend seeing it - the less you know the more fun it is, I would imagine) but it more than made up for it in demented creativeness and a joyful reveling in horror movie tropes and cliches. I'll shut up about it now lest I end up in spoiler territory. Though I will add that I now reeeeeeally want Hollywood to wake up and cast Fran Kranz in more things. Although I do think that of a lot of Whedon alums.

I've been lax in posting pics of my Leslie Knope cross stitch, but I have managed to stick to taking the pictures every day. So here's a huge clump of them all in one. Should have her all finished and framed and ready to post tomorrow, which feels very appropriate with Parks & Rec being back tonight. I'm very excited - it's the first time since I started watching Parks that it and Community have been on at the same time. So I'll probably have another overload from awesome - It's terrible; I'm turning into some Victorian lady with the vapours. At this rate I'll explode by the time the Avengers have assembled! Anyway, here's some Leslie pics: ( Lots of pics under the cut... )

And finally, in this post of ill-fitting-together things, the Magic Mike trailer. I am simultaneously mocking it and also thinking it looks awesome. And I can already anticipate how absolutely ridiculous its fandom will be.



This entry was originally posted at http://anonymityblaize.dreamwidth.org/62179.html.

Me, At Some Nebulous Time In The Past: I become aware of an actor called Channing Tatum. He was quite good in Stop Loss, but he was awful in GI Joe. Admittedly, everyone and everything was awful in GI Joe.* But the salient fact is that I form an opinion on Channing Tatum, and that opinion is that he has a stupid face.

Me, A Few Months Ago: I go see Haywire and enjoy it tremendously. I have lots to say on the subject of how much I like Gina Carano, and it turns out I really enjoyed watching Channing Tatum's stupid face get punched by a hot girl. Later when reading more about Haywire, I find out that Channing Tatum and his stupid face are making another film with Soderberg about his actual facts past as a stripper, featuring a whole bunch of hot actors. I am both confused and intrigued. I put the matter from my mind.

Me, Three Weeks Ago: Channing Tatum still has a stupid face. I am looking for something to watch and the Eagle is available on the anytime+ and lots of people on my flist wrote fic about that movie, so I'm sure I can put up with Channing Tatum's stupid face for the length of the movie.

Me, Three Weeks Minus the Length of the Movie Ago: Channing Tatum's face remains stupid and it's a bit weird being a Scottish person watching a movie about the Romans being generally terrified of my ancestors, but I really liked that. Maybe I should hunt down some of that fic, and be less judgemental of Channing Tatum and his stupid face in the future...

Me, Two Weeks Ago: “Channing Tatum and his stupid face were in a stupid dance movie? I love stupid dance movies! Maybe I should check that out...”

Me, One Week and Three Days Ago: My friend lends me Step Up.** I watch Step Up. It was a stupid dance movie in all the best ways. And it would appear that while his face is quite stupid, the rest of Channing Tatum moves in ways very pleasing to the eye. Suddenly the whole stripper thing makes a great deal of sense.

Me, Less Than A Week Ago: I go see 21 Jump Street. I laugh considerably more than I expected. And I find, that somehow, inexplicably, I have totally become a Channing Tatum fangirl despite his stupid face.

Me, Last Night: *Find all the Channing Tatum tumblrs!* I <3 his stupid faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaace!

It is a very odd life, this fangirl thing.

*I'm still going to see the GI Joe sequel though. Because I am a glutton for punishment, and they’ve added the Rock and Adrienne Palicki to the cast. I am easily swayed by the most random of things.

**By my friend I mean the internet.

This entry was originally posted at http://anonymityblaize.dreamwidth.org/61880.html.

Scotland appears to have skipped spring entirely and jumped straight into summer. It's very confusing, but quite nice. The sunlight seems to have lifted my mood, but I still haven't got back into the swing of this regular posting malarky.

Saw the Hunger Games this week and thought it was amazing. I totally ugly-sobbed my way through the bit that seems to be making everyone cry. Jennifer Lawrence put in an incredible performance and I'm looking forward to watching her career go from strength to strength. And I am loving Woody Harrelson's career resurgence. I haven't read the books and given the massive pile of stuff I want to read that I haven't got to yet, I don't think I'll manage to get round to them for quite a while. Since that means I can't dive into the Hunger Games fandom without the risk of getting spoiled, can anyone answer a few questions I've got?

Under a cut to protect anyone who's not seen the film yet...( Read more... )

My Leslie Knope cross stitch is coming on in leaps and bounds. And I've been pretty disciplined about taking a picture every day which I'm quite chuffed about as I intend to do that with all my projects and never normally manage any better than a pic every few days. So here's how she's looking...

( Read more... )

ETA: Oh dear god why does the LJ cut hate me so? Took me four attempts to make it even slightly sensible! Aargh.

This entry was originally posted at http://anonymityblaize.dreamwidth.org/61556.html.

Hoorah! Hurray! And most definitely cool, cool, cool. I have missed it so much.

So it seems appropriate to post a little thing I made myself a while back, which was inspired by this moment;


I added this to my favourite grey hoodie:

Some more pics ( under the cut... )

.


This entry was originally posted at http://anonymityblaize.dreamwidth.org/61290.html.

Hello, internets. I went into lurker mode for a bit there. I tend to do that when I'm a bit stressed out. Sorry if anyone's been expecting comments or anything from me, but I'm getting back in the swing of it now. I've still got a backlog of crafty stuff I need to post, and I really need to go on a new icon hunt at some point soon (I needs me some parks & rec and avengers icons stat!), but I'm going to ease myself back into the whole actually-participating-in-fandom thing by showing y'all the new cross stitch project I've been working on while I've been grumpy and brooding offline.

So, when I'm done I should have something like this:( under the cut... )


It's moving on pretty quickly, but I wish I'd started this much sooner so I could use it as evidence of Leslie Knope's awesomeness that I would cross stitch her so I could persuade everyone to vote for Leslie in f_march_madness. But instead I'll just leave this here and hope you'll take it to heart!


This entry was originally posted at http://anonymityblaize.dreamwidth.org/61122.html.

Reposting this pic as the Twitter joke trial reached the High Court appeal today. It's utterly baffling to me that this nonsense has got this far without someone doing anything remotely sensible. If you have no idea why I made a cross stitch of a criminal and "clearly menacing" tweet, you can read more about this Orwellian nightmare  here and here.


( More pics... )


This entry was originally posted at http://anonymityblaize.dreamwidth.org/60722.html.

Everyone's seen Kristen Bell having the world's most adorable emotional breakdown, yes?

Well, if you haven't...



And in honour of that adorableness, have a picspam of cute people and cute things. Cos we can always do with some cuteness.

( No apologies for teeth-melting sweetness under the cut )

P.S. I will get around to all those picspams of hottness I promised at some point soon!

This entry was originally posted at http://anonymityblaize.dreamwidth.org/60535.html.

( More pics under the cut... )
 

This entry was originally posted at http://anonymityblaize.dreamwidth.org/60221.html.

So, lessons learnt since posting my Inception cross stitch o' doom:

1.) I need to learn to pick better preview images of crafts projects - the number of people who commented to say they initially thought it was just a print of the poster or something implies to me that some people might have scrolled on by never noticing it was made of cross stitch. Which is oddly complimentary but simultaneously frustrating!

2.) Apparently I'm a really fast cross stitcher. This is a revelation given that I was the worst and the slowest at everything in home ec classes at school. I totally Britta'ed that subject. Just a late bloomer when it came to crafts and such, I suppose.

3.) If I don't pay attention I will type "thabks" rather than "thanks" every single time. Every. Single. Damn. Time.

4.) Cross stitch pattern programs are evil. Why does each program need its own file type thus making all of them incompatible with each other? Because they are bastards, that's why. I kinda knew this already but reason #5 made me face this again...

5.) At least two people out there are foolhardy brave enough to want to try this for themselves, which is always very exciting to me. So exciting that I don't even mind doing battle with technology to get something shareable! So here, have a pattern. Do with it as you will, but credit or a link back here would be appreciated, and I'd love to see the results if anyone does stitch it!

( Click for the pattern! )
This entry was originally posted at http://anonymityblaize.dreamwidth.org/59907.html.

It's finally time for me to unveil my completed Inception cross stitch! I am terribly excited about showing this off, and I hope other people like it as much as I do!

I began thinking about this project around this time last year, but didn't start stitching until towards the end of June. It took me a long time before I was happy with any of the umpty jillion patterns I tried and discarded. I noodled around with several screengrabs and whatnot of the hotel corridor fight for quite sometime before settling on doing the Arthur poster image, mainly because it had a wider range of colours than using a scene directly from the movie. I was finished the actual stitching part by the middle of November so it would seem that I keep taking around five months to do one of these cross stitches o' doom, regardless of the size of the project. (For reference, Arthur is over twice the size and contains over three times the number of stitches as my stitched Serenity, and almost double the stitches of the Enterprise one.)

At no point did I get frustrated with this project, which is a novelty to me. Not even a minor pout or kerfuffle. I can't decide if that's the reason this has been my favourite project so far, or if it is genuinely the best thing I've made. I've certainly never stitched better. The stitches and the tension are much more uniform across the piece than I've ever achieved in the past.

Here come the stats! The stitched design measures 22cm by 29cm. It contains 31,108 stitches from 25 different colours of thread. I used nearly 150 metres of those threads, and almost 50 meters of that is the very dark navy that dominates the piece.

So. Yeah. This happened.


( More pics... )

Many more pics, and larger ones too, can be found here. And if you're interested in the backstory of this I tagged all my work in progress posts with this tag.

(BTW, does this count as fanart? I mean, I know it does, but could I post it to inception comms as fanart? And if so, which ones should I post it to? I am excited to show it off, but confused as to where it would be welcome. I am a bear of very little brain sometimes.)

Right, now I'm off to check my totem so I know I didn't make this beauty in a dream...

ETA: Pattern now available here.

x-posted togeekcrafts here,craftgrrl here,inceptionfilm here,inception_art here, DW Inception here and Tumblr

This entry was originally posted at http://anonymityblaize.dreamwidth.org/59655.html.

Look at me, posting two days in a row. It's shocking, I know. And I will probably post tomorrow as well, because my Arthur cross stitch is framed and looking lovely and i can't wait to share him with the interwebs!

But first, I wanted to share a few Christmas pressies I got, because they are awesome and need to to be shown off!

( Further proof of my mama's geekdom )

And in yet more I-am-so-showing-off news, the super (soo-pa-paa!) rooferrocks (roo-fa-faa!) made me my very own Tardis journal just like River Song's. And it is wonderful! Lookit!



( More pics... )

This entry was originally posted at http://anonymityblaize.dreamwidth.org/59418.html.

As I transfer pictures and patterns and other random files to my shiny new computer I've discovered loads of stuff that I've made and not yet posted any pics of. So working through the backlog should keep me busy for a while, which is quite nice - I was worried I'd have nothing interesting to post until I'd finished any of the umpty-billion half completed and then abandoned craft projects I have cluttering up the place!

So to start out the year, here's the gift I sent for the ontd_startrek secret santa.



( A few more pics... )

And under the cut - the wonderous gifts I received from the lovely silviasmurf

( Yet more pics... )

And to keep up the Star Trek theme, I was asked if I would share my Star Fleet insignia cross stitch patterns, so if you want to stitch any of these...



...then a pattern lies under the cut!

( This cut has a pattern... )

This entry was originally posted at http://anonymityblaize.dreamwidth.org/59136.html.

Well, I have survived 2011, so huzzah. 2012 really has to be an improvement I think. Although, the scary (but sometimes hilariously named) storms we've been having have at least proven that the work that has thus far been completed on our building have definitely returned us to water-proof and draft-proof status. Which has been beyond brilliant. No floods or freezes in my home this winter! So positivity is my watchword for 2012. Either "positivity" or "bloody hell there are too many awesome movies I wanna see". One or the other shall be my watchword for 2012.

Christmas was lovely if a bit busy. I don't think we'll try to do three cities in the space of a week this year. Certainly not by train anyhow. But I saw most of the family, ate a lot of great food, and got some fantastic gifts, a few of which I'll share in my next post. But for today I would just like to show off how marvelously chill I can be when I try my very best.

I received this gift from my sis-in-law:



And I succeeded in not murderising a single person present. Yay, me! \o/

I was marvelously pleased with my zen-like exterior. I shall even be a grateful and un-wasteful person and use these products. Can you wear glitter body gel ironically? I'm certainly going to try.

This entry was originally posted at http://anonymityblaize.dreamwidth.org/57695.html.

I appear to have some sort of home delivery curse. We had a sofa take nearly 3 months to turn up. Food delivery folk need to call us for directions every time we order, because google maps doesn't know our street exists, most sat nav systems direct deliveries up the lane, which is only a means of access to our building on foot, and some ordinance survey maps have our street name spelt wrong (oddly, this never confuses postmen or courier services). And now the new laptop I have ordered isn't coming on the day it was meant to be delivered for a totally unknown reason because the message they left asked me to call them back on a phone number that is not actually a valid phone number. And no one else seems to have any record of my order. Aaaaargh.

So I'm falling back on my old coping mechanism - a random picspam of hot boys.

( Hello, boys )

Yum. That made me feel much better.


ETA: *pets LJ on the head* Poor LJ. Maybe one day some overenthusiastic fangirls will take down Putin just to make you stable once more.

ETA2: Apologies for momentary cut failage! *hits html with hammers*

I am having issues with the linear progression of time. It is all moving far faster than it ought to, I'm sure.

So, it's already that time of year to remind anyone who might be thinking of buying something from my etsy shop that the last posting dates before Christmas are -
UK: Wed 14th December (Parcelforce options available at extra cost until Tue 20th December)
Western Europe: Mon 12th December
Eastern Europe, USA and Canada: Fri 9th December
Everywhere Else: Mon 5th December

In other crafting news, Arthur is finally finished and is quite possibly the best thing I have ever stitched in my life. But you're not getting any pics until I'm happy with the framing, which currently, I am not. I want it to look its best before I unveil it to the world! Well, here's a sneaky peak of the unsightly back side of for now!

( Click for pic! )


This entry was originally posted at http://anonymityblaize.dreamwidth.org/56936.html.

Hello internet world! I have returned! Our phone line went all wonky again and RL has been well busy and made of stress of late. But everything is tentatively fixed and I'm back again. Did I miss anything good?

I've picked a very weird day to get back into the habit of posting. Community is/isn't/is-in-danger-of-being cancelled and there is definitely/definitely-not a Doctor Who movie actually-happening/not-happening/in-development-with-no-one-attached/in-development-with-David-Yates. It's like Schrödinger's news day. I am confused. Someone hold me. Or perhaps tell me not to rely on tumblr for information.

I've been moving a bunch of pics into a new photobucket account to stymie those dastardly hotlinkers from guzzling up my bandwidth allowance, but it does mean I've broken a lot of my own links. I think I've got most of them fixed on lj and I'm going to get around to doing the same on dw as soon as I can, but if I've missed anything please let me know. Don't want to deny anyone their picspams!

Speaking of picspammage, here's some pics of how the Inception cross stitch is coming along.

( Very nearly finnished now! )This entry was originally posted at http://anonymityblaize.dreamwidth.org/56816.html.