Crafts – Erin Knight

Maxi-Lock Serger Thread Sample Cards

Ever get a crazy idea, and then do it?

I was tired of ordering (and returning) Maxi-Lock serger thread (Tex-27 and Maxi-Lock stretch) because it wasn’t anywhere close to the color pictured on the website. Wawak was kind enough to send me a printed sample card, which was closer than online, but it still wasn’t accurate enough. I was tired enough of it that I ordered one cone of every color so that I could make my own sample card, and sell enough of them to get my money back for buying all of those cones.

Turns out – it totally works! My initial method used my embroidery machine on Kona cotton to embroider the names and numbers of the different threads. But unfortunately, it took an hour and a half just to machine embroider the text on one card, and then another couple hours to stitch out the actual color samples. Nope. So I ordered some canvas from Spoonflower with the text printed on there for me, and so all I had to do was add some stabilizer and stitch the color samples on. To do 76 color changes, I timed it would take me about one hour (without any stitching; just threading my machine 76 times.) So, I could work on these cards in batches to eliminate how many times I needed to rethread. I had 45 cards printed, and so I decided to do them in batches of 15. It takes me about 10 minutes to stitch one color across 15 cards. Multiply that by 76… plus the prep time with stabilizer and ironing, etc…. yeah I’d rather not do the math either. It’s still a LOT of time that went into these cards, and at $35 each I am definitely not making up for my time. But, I like to think that I’m doing a favor for 44 other stitchers plus myself to have an awesome reference card and never need to return their thread again ?

Prototype card. Took too long, and didn’t look that great. Totally functional, though.

I’m unfortunately sold out of these for good, but below are reference photos taken in natural light to be as accurate as possible for you use if you weren’t able to snag one. Good luck!

Connect 4 – on paper!

I wanted to bring the game Connect Four to work, but then realized I don’t actually own the game. I forgot to go buy it, and now I was stuck with no game and a game time coming up. Solution? Print a game board on paper, and draw it using X’s and O’s as the pieces. Works great!

I imagine this will be useful to have on hand as a “travel” version of the game, with no pieces to drop and lose.

Connect 4

Here’s a downloadable PDF of the game board I drew, with 2 printed per sheet. If you wanted even smaller boards to save paper, you could print multiple copies of the PDF on one page.

Superblogpostfuntime

Hello! Welcome to March. Felt like making a blog post today because it seems like I’ve been extremely productive this weekend. Unfortunately, my finger feels jammed from being hit yesterday with an air hockey puck (thanks, Mark) but I’ll endure it to type this out.

The weekend started Friday I suppose, when my Perler bead order came in so I finished John’s seminole magnet. I also started recording my first sing-a-ma-jig video, so that’s exciting. I hope to finish that up tonight. I’ve been working on my charity quilt cross stitch square; this year I’m doing a screen shot from the pinball game Crystal Caliburn. I’m probably 2/3 done with that; another couple weeks left I think. Update: see the Sing-a-ma-jig video here!

Saturday was the Day of Activity. Started out playing disc golf in the morning, wasn’t entirely terrible. It was foggy and damp when we started though, so my feet were completely soaked through within minutes. After coming home and drying out, we had a kickball practice in the afternoon, it was probably near 80 by that point, so all the moisture was gone. Last night, we went to lazer tag (thus the air hockey injury) but I did come back to win from a 6-2 deficit, so I’d say I came out ahead. I mention that it was 80 yesterday afternoon so that I can point out that it is now 27 with a wind chill of 15 at the same time of day. WTF, weather.

I also repaired Manoj’s dart board, baked cookies, got a Costco membership, and made a needle-felted turnip.
turnip

Ooh! Ooh! And I just got a new Mac laptop! My old one died a few months ago, but I have put off biting the bullet and getting a new Mac since I didn’t think I really needed one, but now that I want to do more video editing, and learn Xcode for a new project, I finally got one and am super excited.

Hm, I think that’s all. Time to go finish up the sing-a-ma-jig video, which I will share with you shortly!

Year Recap!

Well, hello everybody! I’ve been pretty much the worst blogger ever this year; this has turned more into a quarterly/semi-annual blog than something to actually keep you up to date on what’s going on. Well, I suppose I haven’t deleted it yet. Speaking of, welcome to eknightmusic version 2.0! Probably doesn’t look entirely different, but wordpress has been replaced with just html and jquery.

In other news, finished my first 6 months at GM! I’m taking the rest of the month off, so I’m looking forward to probably even longer of a break than I had while teaching. No plans other than visiting friends/family, but I’ll probably do plenty of crafting. I just bought 7 wall frames at Hobby Lobby, so I now have even more reason to get some pieces done. I’m signed up to have an artist table at Game Over’s Classic Game Fest 2014 in August, so I’m getting my big items prepared. I posted a while back about my “classified” project, so I can post about it now! Keep your eyes peeled in bookstores for “Star Trek Cross-Stitch” (or check it out on Amazon). It’s a book full of Star Trek cross stitch patterns, and I stitched the sampler that is pictured in the book. Bonus points if you tell me the misprint they made on my name!

There’s another secret book in the works that I’ll hopefully be stitching another sample for. In other other news, we started remodeling our guest bathroom. We put down the tile in a weekend, and have been stuck getting it finished since then. We want to order a new countertop, but mostly have just been forgetting about it since we never go in there. Hopefully we can get it done over the break. Oh! While at Lowe’s getting remodel stuff, we got a new Stanley Plant! This one’s all grown up, so I generally call him Daddy Stanley. Thinking about letting him take over Stanley’s old Facebook page.

I think that mostly sums it up; I’ve been pretty busy with work and crafts. Life’s good! Tasha and Mark are good. Looking forward to a break, I’m pretty exhausted right now. We already watched all three Lord of the Rings extended editions over Thanksgiving break, so I don’t know what to watch 🙂 . Need to come up with some series’ to keep me occupied while I stitch. Ooh, also working on the t-shirt quilt of all my high school shirts. Hopefully will finish that over the break, too. That may warrant another post.

Spring Semester – Busy Busy

Hello, world.

So… 2 AM, first blog post in 4 months sounds like a good idea. I’m not just staying up for no reason, my classes are all in the afternoon/evening this semester so I end up staying up late when I get home and sleeping in the next day. I’m currently working on stitching a lime cat. Game Over, the used game store I sell my game art at, is having an art show in March during SXSW, so I’ve been preparing tons of items to stock my table.

While the art show is most on my brain on the weekends, the biggest update since October is I accepted a job offer at GM! They are opening a new tech center in Austin and I’m going to start there in June, after I finish my certificate in May. The last day of class is April 29th this year, which is the first time I’ve ever heard of a semester ending in April. Unfortunately I still have finals spanning the next two weeks after that, but hopefully Mark and I will get to take a vacation to San Diego or Santa Monica before I start work.

In other news: pantry cookies are the best things ever. Buy 2 bars of Ghirardelli semi-sweet chocolate, and follow the recipe for the chocolate cookies, except use butterscotch chips instead of chocolate, and pecans instead of walnuts. They are outstanding. I am calling them as such because I wanted cookies and didn’t want to go to the store, so I made them out of random things I had in the pantry. Result = success.

Just to throw in some music news, so that this post covers all four categories of my blog, Mollie and I are playing/singing at the Ukulele Society meeting this week! First time I’ve volunteered to play, so I’m looking forward to it.

I’ve made so many items recently I’m having a hard time picking one to feature here. I think I’ll go with my Neo Cortex stitch that won December’s villain’s cross stitch challenge vote:
neo