Since I've had time on vacation, I finished up a cross-stitch pattern I started a year ago in the first Dracula Daily round, based on the words Dracula uses to greet Jonathan Harker when he comes to the castle: "Welcome to my house. Come freely, go safely, and leave some of the happiness you bring".
I wanted a sampler for my front hall, but all the patterns I could find were very Hot Topic Goth. Nothing wrong with that, but my goth aesthetic is more "creepy thing found behind the wall in an old attic", and I wanted a pattern that my aunt wouldn't realize was anything out of the ordinary. I was looking around for inspiration and stumbled on an 1871 sampler by 12-year-old Jemima Clements in the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. It's a little bit early for Dracula but the aesthetic was spot on, so I spent a long time squinting at a zoom of the best download of it they had to copy the wolves and the letters, and then left it for almost a year because I got frustrated trying to figure out how to get a good-formatted pattern out.
When we came up on a year I transcended frustrated and went with the good-old fashioned grandma method and transferred my pixels to a spreadsheet. So on the off chance you want a creepy Dracula sampler for your front hall, I now have it in .pdf and a downloadable Google Sheet. The .pdf is formatted to print on legal paper, but it will be a bit small that way; you are welcome to fiddle with the spreadsheets to get it the size you want.
PDF of the pattern of the Dracula quote
^this will not work if your browser redirects to https because my webhost messed that up, but it should work if you force http
Google Drive link to a shareable/downloadable Sheets file
The pattern uses 7-10 different thread colors; I don't believe in locking in brand-name floss, so the pattern includes color description and it's up to you to find stuff in your stash that looks good together.
I could not come up with a decision on the border, so the options are:
Make all the flowers plain lavender
Use a variegated purple for the flowers
Pick 4-6 different shades of lavender/light purple and alternate them - this is most similar to Jemima's border
Use the "allium flower" pixel art pattern I coded into the pattern (recommended only if you recognized the allium flower pixel art pattern I used.)
Rules: shuffle your 'on repeat' playlist & post the first ten tracks, then tag ten people. If you're not on spotify, just share ten songs that you have on repeat.
I not only do not use Spotify, I also frequently borrow CDs from the library and rip them, as Gretchen does! If you own the MP3 they can't yoink it away from you, and you can have as many rare live recordings and unreleased demos as you want. However, I do have a playlist of songs that I can listen to on repeat literally for hours and not get tired of, so from that playlist, in no particular order:
Time Stand Still - Rush
Make You Better - The Decemberists
Love And Anger - Kate Bush
Distant Early Warning - Rush
Runaway - Bon Jovi
Mystic Rhythms - Rush
Colors - Halsey
The Suburbs - Arcade Fire
Science/Visions - CHVRCHES
Lucky Hood - LAKE R∆DIO
There is...significantly more Rush on this list than I had expected. And typing 'Colors' like that without the U hurt me physically, lol.
I'm going to tag @seiya234, @marzipanandminutiae, @thelibrarybat, @amethystunarmed, @monsterhunting, @enquiringangel, @pingnova, @bixxelated,@daddygrandpaandthebeaver, and @angryinterrobang! And if you'd like to do it and don't see your name here, go for it.
I love pedal pairings that can transform music into sounds from another place. Clean guitar loop downsampled, bitcrushed, grain sliced, and filtered through the @digdugdiy Lofi Dreams, and sent through a non-existent room in Draume by @pladaskelektrisk. Recorded on a Tascam 414.