My cross-stitch progress has slowed somewhat, after a busy Saturday and even busier week at work. I spent a bit of Sunday working away though, and am hoping to work a little more this weekend if I can.

I got a bit tired of all the black and gray parts and switched over to the orange, which is actually a blend or orange and yellow and only half of a cross stitch. I haven’t done much of blending thread colors before, or varying stitches, but the effect is really quite nice.

I also tried to make some stickers last weekend, using Japanese papers (yuzen), a paper punch, and an adhesive machine. I was thinking of selling some on my Etsy store, just to see if there’s interest, but first I need to make a few more and take photos.

I also sent off my part of the Paper Swap a few weeks ago (cards and envelopes I made), and since then have been getting various parts from the other folks in the swap. My favorites have been some prints of various images, including a card from Frantic Meerkat and an assortment of prints from Snow Owl.

Amytha and I spent the day up in San Francisco, mainly to attend the Renegade Craft Fair at Fort Mason this weekend. I’ve been looking forward to it ever since I heard about it coming to San Francisco, after reading about it going on in Chicago and Brooklyn in the past.

We got up there shortly after it had started, and parking wasn’t too bad. They had the entire Festival Pavilion reserved, and for a building that size, it was great to see it 3/4 full of craft tables. It was probably the biggest craft fair I’ve ever been to, and the best part was that there was no admission fee (other than parking, which ended up being $1 for 1-1.5 hours).

We made our way up and down the aisles, picking up a few business cards, inspecting items here or there, and continuing along. The first actual items we got were free promotional items from SF Weekly and Yelp, both sponsors of the event; the Yelp tote bag was especially nice.

As for the craft booths, I saw a few things that caught my eye, but I didn’t really feel compelled to buy anything right then and there. After awhile, it felt like everything started blurring together, with very similar items (so much vintage clothing!) and designs (enough birds already!) at one table after the other. That’s not to say that there weren’t any unique things there, but it just wasn’t earth-shattering or anything.

Now I recognize that part of it may be that I know a lot of what goes into making some of these things, and I see a lot on the craft blogs and online shops that I visit regularly. But even so, it seemed like there were an awful lot of similarities (and somewhat high prices) going on. Maybe part of it is that once you get to a certain level, you need to appeal to certain audiences to sell items. And maybe that audience just isn’t me. I don’t know.

That said, I will reiterate that I did see some things that I liked, even if I didn’t buy anything right away. I’ve bookmarked a few sites and plan on visiting them to reconsider a purchase. You might like to visit them too:

• Twinkle Jewelry
• Fernworks Fine Art
• Pinkie Paper
• Brookadelphia
• Seibei

It was so hot yesterday that I just couldn’t sit and cross-stitch, or read, or do much else last night. I did a few stitches and then gave up, because it was so uncomfortable. It’s not too bad today, but the whole week is expected to be pretty hot, so it’ll be a repeat of yesterday I’m sure. That and I have plans in the evening.

I had a slow day at work though, so I ended up messing around with a few cross-stitch-related things. First, I tried playing around with an image in Photoshop, to see how difficult it would be. It isn’t so bad, but I didn’t have an easy way of figuring out the floss colors, so I let that sit.

At home later I fixed PC Stitch on my new laptop and it is so much easier than messing with Photoshop! I had an old copy that I bought off of eBay awhile ago, and once I sorted out some errors, I was generating patterns like nothing. I’ll need to clean a few up, but this will make it pretty easy, once I find my images. I think I might use something from a Japanese web graphics site I like, called Fool Lovers.

In the middle of my playing around, I ended up on the DMC web site, to find info on their flosses. It turns out that they’ve created a line of Hello Kitty stitching kits and patterns, including some cross-stitch. I’m not really enamored with Hello Kitty for the most part, but if you are, you should take a look at the new collection. (If you’d rather go for free Sanrio patterns though, I would highly recommend Sanrio DIY Crafts.)

On a non-cross-stitch note, I woke up this morning to find an Etsy order for a few handmade items in my store. I haven’t sold anything handmade there in what feels like such a long time, so that was nice. Not that I’ve been adding anything new to it, or doing very anything much to promote it, so I guess that’s not a surprise. It’s funny because I’m trying to close down my eBay store for now, because I’d like a break from it, but I think I’m ok with leaving my Etsy store open. I’ve had some ideas for new things I could make and post there, and maybe eventually I’ll get around to doing that.

Last week, the South Bay Craft Group had its last monthly meeting at the Campbell Library. Amytha, the group founder, wanted to move away from teaching crafts to just being social and crafting, so another one of the librarians at Campbell took over and shifted the meetings to Saturdays starting next month.

Going forward, the group will still be meeting, but in more of a “freestyle” approach. There will be no set monthly meetings, and the plan is to drop the structured lessons we used to have. The new meetings will depend on who suggests a meeting, and the locations and times will vary. But the idea is that you just bring something to work on and come hang out with everyone.

Our first “freestyle” meeting will be this Thursday evening at the Mission College Starbucks in Santa Clara. If you’re in the area and want to join, just bring a craft project with you and stop by around 7:30pm. I’ve posted about the event on Craigslist and Yelp, and Chel (another SBCG member) has also posted to Facebook, so you can go to any of those sites for more info.

I worked on my new cross-stitch project a little further today, and here’s where I was as of this afternoon:

I also tried searching around for some more interesting patterns, and had a little bit of luck on some Korean and Japanese sites. Nothing more than a small image here or there, but enough to get me thinking that maybe I should just sit down and find some images to make my own patterns with.

I did also order a kit designed by Pinn Stitch, the company that made the Ganesh one I did awhile ago. It’s a bit larger than I realized though, so I don’t know if I’ll jump right into that one after the current one is done, but we’ll see. The previous kit I had from them was really well done though, so that’s good at least.

Thanks for everyone’s comments on yesterday’s post by the way. Ismoyo recommended the Knitpro tool for converting images into charts; it’s similar to another tool I remember trying out, though that one has been taken down and turned into a craft store instead.

And Distel guessed that the design might be of a butterfly; it’s not, but I can see how it might look that way. What does it look like today?