Aida Dying 101- The Oven Method!

 I don't think I have ever posted about my adventures in dying aida!!  That's shocking... 

Anyway, years ago, I learned a method of dying aida, or cross-stitch fabric, and I have not looked back!  There are so many possibilities and it's a lot cheaper than buying it from the shops online.  It's a little pricey!  I have posted several cross-stitch pieces here for which I have dyed the aida myself.  

I learned the oven method from a YouTube video that I can no longer find.  Luckily, I wrote the steps down.  I use the Rit liquid dye and the powder dye as well.  

Basically for the oven method, you preheat your oven to 275 degrees.  Rinse the aida in cold water and wring it out really well.  Mix your dye- I never measure.  I just start out with a small amount in a plastic or glass cup, and then pour a little boiling water over, and then test the color on a piece of white scrap aida by dipping a plastic spoon into the dye and water and dropping it onto the aida.  A good thing to note is that the color will be a bit lighter on the fabric when it dries.  

When you have the color you want, scrunch your aida into an oven- safe dish.  I just use a casserole dish I have.  The video said to use a specific one for dying only but I have used the ones I also use for cooking and it's fine because... well, you wash it before you cook with it, duh.  

Anyway, scrunch your fabric to fit into the dish.  The scrunchier it is, the more texture you will have in your design.  Pour your dye over the fabric and move it around a bit to get it nice and coated.  Pop the dish into the oven and cook for 30 minutes.  Then you will remove the dish, remove the aida with tongs, and rinse in cold water.  Wring it out and press it in a towel to get the moisture out.  

Some people dry theirs in the dryer, but I just air dry mine, and then iron.  It looks so cool!  Here is a piece I dyed today- I still need to iron it.  I will do a Toadghoul by Noctiflora on this one.  For the brown bits, I sprinkled some powdered Rit dye while the fabric was waiting to go into the oven, and I like the effect it made!

I will post about the ice method in my next post, and then we will talk about the jar method!

Yee Haw!

 Well, it's the last day before our Thanksgiving break and I am having a hard time concentrating at work.  I'm just ready for a nice 4 days off and to eat good food and to decorate!  I may start decorating my office today, at least put the little Yule tree up!  

I saw something about people in North Carolina running ICE agents into the woods because they are tired of the bully gestapo coming in and harassing and abusing American citizens due to the color of their skin.  It's wild this is happening in the US... anyway, someone said they couldn't think of anything more "Yee haw, fuck the law!" and I love that phrase, so I made a cross stitch pattern and stitched it up yesterday.  

I'm quite happy with it and I think it will definitely get a frame and be displayed somewhere!  I have those Command velcro strips I can use to hang things on the wall without damage, so I think I may use those to hang up some of my pieces in my office.  I don't want to cover the walls again, because the walls in here are so nice and it's a small room and I don't want it to feel cramped, but I'll put a few up anyway.  

Lovely Cozy Weekend

 We had an absolutely LOVELY weekend!

Friday night, we went to our favorite bar here in Pueblo.  It's at a really cool food court-esque spot called Fuel and Iron.  We had a couple of drinks and then hopped down to our favorite vegan spot called The Cutting Board.  They have the best sandwiches I have ever put into my face hole.  It was drizzly and a little chilly, which I love!  

Here's a pic of the sandwich I usually get- this pic is of the first one I had back when we visited to look at houses in July and it doesn't look like much but HOLY SHIT- Confit portobello, shallots, pickles, spinach, vegan gouda (this man is a freakin melty cheese WIZARD- usually vegan cheese melts minimally if that), and some special chipotle aoili.  I've had a few other things there and always come back to this.  

Saturday we did adulting, and it looked like rain all day, but didn't actually rain.  Apparently, it doesn't rain a ton in Pueblo, and it's sort of a situation like it was in Hutto.  70% chance of rain elsewhere means it's 70% chance of no rain here.  lol but I don't mind because it's not balls-ass hot all damned year.  Then Sunday, the only things I did that were "adulting" were laundry and a bit of grocery shopping super early and then the rest of the day was snuggled up on the couch doing cross stitching and watching true crime and horror movies with my sweet lil husband.  Here are the results:

I finished my Amanita Phantasia pattern by Noctiflora designs on Saturday evening. This is my second pattern by her.  I have a few and LOVE the colors she uses, so I will be stitching up a few more of these beauties soon!  And I dyed this fabric myself :)  

I've had this pattern for a while.  I am a huge horror movie fan and so I had to get this.  I did "zombie green" on black aida.  Black aida is a bit of a challenge but I really love how other colors pop on it.  I am not great at stitching on it, but I think I'll start doing more so I can practice and get better.  

Pattern is by badstitchclub on Etsy.

And I was in the mood, after being a gore whore, to stitch up a snowflake.  I LOVE stitching snowflakes!  I can't remember where I got this skullflake pattern.  I stitched it on glittery aida with etoile floss, but the glitter, of course, doesn't show up very well  :(  BOOO.  Oh well, I still think it's cute!  

This week will be a short week, since we are off on both Thursday and Friday for Thanksgiving.  I will be decorating for Christmas but I'm sure to find more time for cross stitching and I also have a pattern I printed out on Stick N Stitch that I may get around to embroidering! 

Tardis Door and Tree of Gondor

I have been a busy bee lately!  Saturday through yesterday, I painted our new kitchen door.  The reason it took so long was because I painted the stucco patches and the stucco on the frame as well as the outside frame itself on Saturday and wanted it to be completely dry before I started on the door.  Then on Sunday, I painted the trim on the inside of the house and the door on the inside.  I wanted to make sure it was completely dry before taping things off to touch up and doing the second coat.  We were able to leave the door open to let the frame dry and do a second coat.  

Sunday I painted the outside of the door, but it starts getting dark kind of early now, so I didn't have a chance to finish second coat and inside of the frame on Sunday.  Monday is was SUPER SUPER windy and so I didn't do anything to it.  So yesterday, I did the second coat and finished the frame and it just looks so super beautiful and I am so happy to have a door that doesn't squeak and scrape super loud every time we open it and a door handle that's not janky!!  

How gorgeous is this blue?  It's Outer Space by Behr.  It's the approved color for "Tardis Blue".  

Other fun things- we went for a walk yesterday and look at this tree across the street from our house (that's our cute yellow house in the background)!  It's a natural Christmas Tree!  I wonder if they will decorate it for Christmas... I tried decorating a couple of times outside when we lived in Hutto, but it gets so windy that it blew everything all over and some days, we get wind like that here too, so I just have my solar faerie lights on the porch.  

Speaking of, when redoing my faerie lights (I had to move the solar panel on them so I had to totally remove one set and what a pain in the ass that was to get them back up!), I heard this loud squawking, like a goose, approaching me and I was like "What the fuck is that squawking?"  Then I realized it was coming from overhead.  It was a pack of geese flying south!!  In Texas, I never saw that.  Or if I did, they were already too high up for me to hear them.  It was really cool!  I didn't get a pic because I was too busy oggling!  

I also finished my Tree of Gondor cross stitch last night.  It was a pretty easy one, even though I used navy blue as the fabric, and I did it in glow-in-the-dark thread which to be honest isn't quite as easy as regular because it tends to fray a little, but I am happy with how it turned out.  I haven't tested the glow brightness.  

The Witchy Stitcher Cryptid Stitch-Along FINAL INSTALLMENT: Popelick Goatman

 After I finished Bigfoot, I decided to go ahead and finish the entire Cryptid Stitch-along out and ended with the Popelick Goatman!

The Popelick Goatman is one I had never heard of.  Then I got this stitch-along and saw him on there.  I watched a show called Out There:  Crimes of the Paranormal and they had an episode about him.  I thought it was really interesting.  

There is a railroad trestle over Pope Lick Creek outside of Louisville, Kentucky.  The Goatman is said to live there.  There are accounts of him luring people there to fall to their deaths from the trestle.  Some accounts say he jumps from the top of the trestle onto the hood of cars passing over the trestle.  And some accounts say he chases people and they jump to their deaths.  He is supposedly part man, part goat and part sheep.  

Whatever he is, this depiction is awfully cute. I'm sure he's much more fearsome in real life... I wouldn't want to find out. 

The Witchy Stitcher Cryptid Stitch-Along: Bigfoot

This is the next to last installment of The Witchy Stitcher's Cryptid SAL.  This will be the first SAL I ever finished!  I almost finished Lola Crow's Creepy Christmas SAL a few years ago but didn't get around to the last pattern.  Maybe I can do that one next year.  Her patterns are AMAZING but to make them so nice, she has to do big portions of what I call "confetti", which is several different colors in a small area that are similar and hard to distinguish between (apart from the symbols on the pattern, which sometimes my brain mixes up), and that is something I struggle with.  I get easily annoyed.  That's not anything against her or her patterns, and I will still do them no matter how annoyed I get, but that's just why I didn't finish that SAL.  

But I digress.  I technically finished all of the Cryptid SAL, but she included three cryptids to chose from for the final installment.  You could choose for the last one Hodag (which I posted not too long ago), Popelick Goatman or Bigfoot.  I suppose I technically chose Hodag, which I posted not long ago.  Last night I finished Bigfoot.  Like all the other cryptids in this SAL, he is just so cute!!  

Bigfoot is one of my favorite cryptids.  Apparently where I grew up in the piney woods of East Texas is a hotbed for Bigfoot sightings.  I didn't know that until last year and that's a good thing because I would have been terrified to go into the woods had I known that as a kid.  And apparently, The Witchy Stitcher lives in a Bigfoot Hotspot, somewhere in Canada!  How interesting.  

Everyone knows who Bigfoot is.  "The term 'Bigfoot' is used to describe a legendary race of "ape" men all over the world, with sightings back to the 1800s.  A Bigfoot is a heavy, bipedal humanoid ape.  It is believed that Bigfoot stands at around eight to ten feet tall.  It has dense fur, ranging in colors from red to white to brown.  It has very large feet." - The Witchy Stitcher

Weekend Finishes and Frames

I had a nice productive weekend.  We woke up at a decent hour Saturday, and I was able to finish up my "Decorative Gourd" pattern from Subversive Cross Stitch!  My mom decorates really cute for each holiday, and I thought she would like this.  The original pattern says "It's decorative gourd season, motherfuckers!" but this is the one I was talking about that I wanted to make for Mom, and wanted to clean up.  I thrifted the frame from Goodwill and I think it's perfect!  It only cost me $3!  I used the DMC Charles Craft printed aida in the orange color. 

I also found the perfect frame for my Witchy Stitcher Christmas cross stitch that I finally finished.  I love how it turned out. 

For this one, I wanted to go square or round, and there weren't any frames that fit, so I did have to buy this from the evil Christians at Hobby Lobby.  I wish the picture showed the colors better, but this was the best I could do without my stupid reflection in the glass.  It came out nicely and now I have to figure out where to display my Christmas beauties this year! I have a lot of decorations and not a lot of space anymore, so I'm thinking maybe I'll just switch out stuff each year and rather than hang my Creepy Christmas set up (since I can't hang things easily), I'll put these up somewhere this year and then figure out a way to display the others next year.  

We had lunch at Applebees.  I got a drink called the Slay All Day Rita.  What a silly name for a drink... it was really good!  

Maybe it was due to the day drinking but I was absolutely KNACKERED when we got home from running our errands... but I made myself get up and do some tidying around the house.  I started not feeling great, like I had a horrible  headache that evening and I felt a lot of pressure on my sinuses, so I just spent all day Sunday resting (Dr. Allen's orders) and watching TV.  I started on my Bigfoot cross stitch but didn't really get very far.  But today, I do feel a lot better and I'll probably work on it a bit tonight. 

Right now, they have all the Christmas stuff out and it makes me excited!  They have lots of candles out at WalMart and I know, it's an evil, evil, company, but some of us can't afford $25 candles elsewhere, okay??? Unless they are on sale... anyway, they have the Goose Creek candles there!  They make ones that smell like Little Debbie snacks and they have a Harry Potter range as well.  The only ones I liked where Hufflepulff and Slytherin.  I wanted to get a Hufflepuff for me and a Ravenclaw for Allen but the Ravenclaw one doesn't smell that great.  So I settled for some Hufflepuff wax melts and they smell DIVINE.  

Tiny Swearing

I wanted to start on a cross stitch for my mom, just because, but I have to alter the pattern because it says "Motherfuckers" on it and I wanted it to say "Y'all".  But I really had the itch to stitch, even after I finished my "All I Want for Christmas is Your Soul" piece, so I stitched this little cutie up last night while watching the series finale of Star Trek:  The Next Generation with my cute lil husband.  We have seen it a million times but both love that series so much.  

I am not sure what count this fabric is- it's either 16 or 18 ct.  It's a lot smaller than I thought it would be and it fits in my 2" ornament hoops!  I think it's cute.  My mom disagrees... so I MUST alter the cross stitch pattern I want to make for her!

I Don't Ask for Much for Christmas.

 I have had this pattern from The Witchy Stitcher for years.  It was always really intimidating to me, because there is so much going on and with my short attention span, I never thought I'd be able to enjoy and finish it.  Boy, was I wrong.  I think it took me like a week of stitching but I did it!

In our new house, the walls aren't really meant to hang stuff on, I guess, because we have to have concrete drills to make any holes in the walls in most rooms, and in some, there is really cool wallpaper I don't want to hang stuff on, and in OTHER rooms, there is a nice white paneling they have put up that I am a huge fan of... but I plan to frame this and I will find somewhere to display for the holiday!

It's taking me a lot of self-restraint not to decorate for Christmas right now.  I'm usually good until after Thanksgiving but I think it may be because last year, I didn't decorate since we were packing and this year, we're in a new home.  But I'm being good!  I do already have spaces cleared out for decorations, though!