Picturelessness and other technical problems

Shoot, my camera is broken, therefore I cannot take any pictures. And when I say camera, I think of the device taking photos. We have recently purchased the kind of camera that records moving pictures, if you know what I mean. Native English speakers, please help me out!

Anyway, now I can tape my baby girl's singing and dancing. I have even created a YouTube addy and hope to upload those little scenes soon. For now I cannot download them to the computer because we cannot install the camera's softwares. Our CD drive is dead too.

I have complained about this on my Yahoo! boards but for those who have missed it: we had record breaking heat waves in Hungary during the past couple of weeks. Our computer is unfortunately located at the warmest spot of the flat which often led to a number of emergency shutdowns. This made it impossible to do much work at the computer, so I couldn't update my blog or answer my mail as frequently as I wanted. One day the PC gave up completely, and moved to the other side of the rainbow, advertising its departure with a loud "pop" and a blackout. After switching electricity back on and getting rid of the smoke, we bought some spare parts for it, including a new power supply unit with a more effective ventillating device. Since then, our PC has been running more smoothly and with less noise. However, certain parts refuse to work, including our CD-drive.

Lucky for me that the scanner is working just fine. This way I can keep my HAED progress updated. I stitch on Magic Witch every week, at least for a couple of hours. I still have a lot to stich on my Round Robins too. Here is a scan of my latest finish. It's Birthday Flowers by Jeremiah Junction and I stitched the last segment, the Lily-of-the-valley.

As you an see, I have been trying to redesign my blog too. I'm afraid I'm not very good at it. I tried to use some free blog skins, but I can't use them without using all the extra info - links and stuff - I have at the sidebars. I have not given up yet, but I am a little bit frustrated. I haven't even figured out how to use my Yahoo Avatar! Whatever, at least I have added at least a dozen more stitching blog addresses. I have been planning to do that for months. My goals may be far, but I am getting there anyway!

Progress on Ice Angel

Last week I spent some time browsing through my charts and UFOs. I was totally amazed when I found Ice Angel and Deepest Love. They are so huge! OK, some of you experienced BAP stitchers may laugh about this, but in fact, these two are the biggest projects I ever started! Well, no that is not entirely true, because the teddy bear height chart is bigger in size, but it has several smaller motifs on it, and much less fabric is covered in stitches than any of the aforementioned charts. In short, they are the biggest projects regarding stitch count. And I found it quite surprising, because I do not remember thinking of them as really big pieces, BUT THEY ARE!

Anyway, I needed a break from my RRs. I am in three of those and I regretted joining one of those on the second month. You might remember that we are doing the Tiny Teacups and each month I must stitch the SAME blue teacup on another piece of fabric. I am so bored of it! I am also doing Jeremiah Junction's Birthday Flowers in another RR. It was quite embarrassing at first, because I mis-read the deadlines so I was late sending it on from the first moment. So I put everything aside to make haste on that RR, until the day I discovered that other members were even more late than I was. What hurt me most is they didn't even have the decency to feel ashamed about it.

So I decided to be a bit selfish and "dust off" Ice Angel. I was not working on it since last August, when, as some of you might remember, we were working with doubled effort on the translation that never got paid. Anyway, I did not stitch on anything bigger than an A4 page and mostly I have done some model stitching. The RRs were good because I knew the other stitchers count on my fingers. Otherwise I would have stopped stitching completely for a few months. But I am back on track. I spent the last three days finishing her hair (only the beads and metallics missing) and made some progress on the wings as well. I plan to finish stitching the wings before I continue with her dress. Here is a picture on my progress. The picture above has no progress, but it was the first scan I have made of Ice Angel as I got the scanner for Christmas. :)

Stitchers' meeting

Last Saturday saw another meeting of the Hungarian online cross stitchers club. There is a message board on a ladies' site, where all these stitchers met. Together they have hammered out the idea of a Hungarian magazine, and by now they have their own home page, with picture galleries, message boards, conversion tables, and so on.

I have joined them about 18 ms ago. They didn't welcome me as I thought they would, and I felt offended, so I didn't go there for a while. I felt more at home with my American friends. They have greeted me as if they had known me all my life and I never felt left out of anything at all.

I learned so much from my overseas stitching friends! I wanted to share everything with my natives, I wanted to organize round robins, exchanges, stitch-alongs... but all my attempts have failed. I was "greeted" with suspect, as if I wanted to cheat out their money and stash. I was, once again, deeply hurt. I visited their monthly meetings, but usually just looked at their projects and rarely spoke with anyone.


As I wrote in an earlier post, few months later someone threw in the idea of round robins again, and this time it was accepted with enthusiasm. Maybe because one of their "older" members made the suggestion, I don't know. Anyway, I decided to swallow my pride and put aside my hurt feelings and joined a few RRs. Here on the side you can see one with herbs - I'm not taking part in this one though, I just love the way it looks. :)

These things with cute animals - mainly Margaret Sherry's cats - are gifts done by the whole community for the newborn baby of one of the members. This is but half of all the stuff they stitched!

Anyway, by now my nick is getting more and more familiar in that community, and I have a few friend-like relationships too. I am saying this because for me "friend" stands for someone I have known for years and learned to trust.