I'm not nearly as well-read as I once was as a child. The unfortunate truth is, I often lack the patience for reading, particularly on days when I get bad cases of FOMO and feel like it's a waste of time for me to be sitting and reading. I think I'm missing the bigger picture, though. Further, as a writer, my ability to write is probably severely diminished.
To that end, since last year, I've tried to make a much larger effort to keep reading. I've recently been introduced to the concept of audiobooks. I was initially very skeptical. How is listening to someone read a book any different from plopping down in front of the tube? Well, actually, pretty different. I find that I'm still using all the same brain functions to read between the lines, make predictions, and process the meanings of unfamiliar words. The only difference is, I hear it in some voice actor's silky tones instead of my own stumbling chatter.
One of my recent reads is Words of Radiance, a book of the Stormlight Archives by Brandon Sanderson. So far, there are only two books in the series, but they are fantastic. It's difficult for me to pinpoint just what I enjoy about the books, but as someone who never read epic fantasies as a child, it really makes me wish I had expanded my reading horizons a lot earlier in life. Part of what draws me to them, though, I think, is the main voice actor - Michael Kramer. Here's an example of his work from the first book, The Way of Kings.
If I could bottle a voice and make sweet love to it every night before I went to bed, I would never need a vibrator again.
This shouldn't come as much of a surprise, but DG was the one who introduced me to the books. I will admit, it was slow for me to start -- there was a LOT going on, and I had a hard time keeping up with all the transitions between characters (something I wasn't used to in most of the books I'd read growing up, but is evidently pretty common in books such as these, as I later found out). Once it started picking up pace, I was hooked. I devoured WoK and shortly thereafter, WoR. I highly, HIGHLY recommend them both, and I cannot wait for the third book to hit shelves.
So, as I am wont to do, I made a crafty homage.
One of both my and DG's favorite characters, Kaladin, is part of a brigade of sorts known as Bridge 4. In the universe in which Stormlight Archives takes place, written words appear as glyphs. Bridge 4 has its own glyph, which looks like this:
Well, I figured I could do something with this. After some Pinterest and reddit browsing, I came across a tutorial for embroidering scarves, specifically for Link's scarf from Hyrule Warriors. Holy sweet fricker fracker, I could not hope to repeat that girl's excellent work, but I thought I could try.
So, first things first - print the pattern and trace it out:
One cramped hand later, I was ready to start the really hard part of the process: embroidering this whole dealio:
I think, if you were to sum all hours I spent on just the stitching, it likely came close to 30+. I am not a fast stitcher. However, to my credit, I never learned to embroider, growing up. C did it some, and I did a few stitches on one or two of her projects, but I never did anything of my own. All in all, I don't think I did a bad job for my first time.
Aaaaand, because I do the whole blogging thing, I forgot to take more interim pictures. Here's the final product:
So, you'll notice that it kind of looks stiff around the edges. Why is that, you might ask? Well, I was concerned that when I sewed the raw edges together, I wouldn't be able to keep the fabric straight for the entire length, and that it would all get skewed as I sent it through the machine. In order to give it structure, I decided to use fusible interfacing. That turned out to be a huge mistake. While I got the stability I wanted, the finished product is not very soft and does not lay flat around the neck/shoulders/etc. Also, if we ever accidentally send it through a warm wash, we're screwed. Oh well. Lessons learned for next time.
So what was the occasion? St. Valentine's Day (yeah, I know. I told you, I'm really behind on posting projects.)
I tried to get DG to model the scarf. He wanted me to paint him like one of my French girls, but Jagger just wanted to french him.
Just kidding, here it is on him:
Why is he holding a copy of the book, might you ask? Oh. Only because I'm the coolest girlfriend in the world, and got a signed copy from the author himself:
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| "For David: A Radiant in his own right, and one too badass to need a shard blade" |
Until the next.
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