Plus pizza.

The fiber of today’s friday is not the yarn kind, but instead my current obsession, which is chain-stitch embroidery.

(I went looking for examples of this sort of thing, and wanted CC-licensed stuff, and lo and behold this one was the one that popped up! It’s a good example. See the lines and little swirls? That’s what I’m shooting for, eventually. Image from here.)

I am not as good as the above image. But someday I will be. The spiffy part also comes when you hook through the back of the fabric, and  slide a bead onto the stitch on the front. You can do rows of beads this way, or little spangles, or, in my case, tiny pearls (all the tiny little pearls I can manage).

Yeah. This has nothing to do with fiber, but it’s really awesome, and sort of tangentially related. There’s fiber there! Under the embroidery. Yes…

After Tuesday evening and a minor bit of frustration, I took a breather. Last night, just to see what would happen, I picked up the tambour needle and some new, gold thread, and tried it.

I am not slow.

I say this, because it would be wrong to say that I am fast. I am not. However, I got a decent little sampler completed in a relatively short period of time, and am now pretty darn confident that when it comes to embroidering The Big Skirt (my new pet name for my ghagra), I won’t finish six years after I start. My goal is a year, start-to-finish. With any luck, I can do it in six months.

And then tonight we went to the best pizza restaurant ever in all of Atlanta (no, really, it is), and we ate the pizza we bought in roughly 15 minutes, and then we sat around like giant dough-filled lumps for a bit before doing some house cleaning. I think I may eat lentils only tomorrow. Perhaps some wood shavings. I need fiber. The pizzeria is Antico Pizza Napoletana and it’s delicious. The husband is forever on a quest to create the perfect pizza, so he was mesmerized by their wood-fired oven. He timed it, even. It apparently cooks the pies in 2 minutes flat. He was impressed, and mentioned that we’ll need to take the CG by there sometime, so she can see the pizza oven (it’s spiffy!).

But my hugest accomplishment for the weekend is my personal website, which is sort of functioning. Before I knew what I was doing (sort of) I knew just enough to put up a splash page with some link boxes made using the visual interface in Dreamweaver, and it never quite looked right. But now I have a real site! With real navigation! And it sort of works (except for the testing part which I totally broke 10 minutes before leaving work today and also curse you, jquery, because you make no sense yet)!

I will not be touching the Dreamweaver this weekend.