Balina!! @Balina@cybre.space

Cross-stitch and embroidery are not the same thing, but sometimes you get an idea so wild you have no choice but to dive into it. This is going to be a monstrous labor of love. Or a labor of monstrous love. We'll see.

...There's supposed to be 1 more skein, but the craft store only had 27 of the 28 flavors I need.

Finished the third one in this kit. Still enjoying myself, still learning as I go. I complain a lot about how almost every set of embroidery patterns is just flowers, but on the flip side: flowers pretty.

Already picked up another kit for more practice, and learning new stitches for it. Plus picked up some scrap cloth to fiddle with slash use up some of the leftover floss.

It feels a little silly to realize how much of this was me brute-forcing the last few patterns, honestly; the heart on that gray cloth was simply the realization that I could do a quick stitch for the outline, then do a satin stitch over top of it. Way easier than trying to stay on painted lines!

Yesterday was rough. Today, both of these wonderful little creatures showed up at the same time, despite both hailing from overseas. I choose to believe they heard how badly I needed them.

I picked up an embroidery starter kit earlier this year; one of those skills I'd like to have available to me. Even just being confident with a needle to mend clothes is useful, after all.

Finally been working at it; still have a lot to learn, but we gotta start somewhere, yeah?

Realizing a few hours after waking up that the adventure game I was playing about a detective who more or less abandoned her job to follow after and attempt to romance a size-shifting villainess was, despite the love and care that went into it, simply something I dreamed up.

This is doubly frustrating because a major theme of this dream was me being constantly amazed at how hard it committed to some of its gags; the errand run sidequest that turned into navigating a 124-aisle supermarket full of weird knockoffs being the one that took the longest.

The part that *really* got me was realizing a few minutes afterward that, wait a fucking second, I sprung for and bought the premium DLC! That dream robbed me!

Hm. Maybe the doll was originally part of something worse, like the human-facing part of a mimic. A disguise that was cast off like a hermit crab trading to a bigger shell, left alone until it got bored of laying there, then realized it was capable of thinking enough to be capable of being bored in the first place.

Saw a picture of a smug pointy fox lady over at https://twitter.com/yen_rin/status/1535258132515266560 -- she's been sneaking around my head, and I'm trying to figure out how to twist this to my own ends and/or gender.

I don't think she's *exact* vibe is what I'm after, but these last couple of days, being the reason so many people go disappearing in the woods late at night sounds like fun. What? No, I don't eat them. They just don't tend to feel like leaving when I'm done with them~

(Balina, this is Il Mheg. You're describing the pixies.)

Just offscreen: the wheelbarrow full of 2,200 bone fragments that the Capering Relicker has brought me for the eighth time this week.

Fallen London

Finding myself feeling an unfamiliar urge to be a sneaky, slinky, tricky piece of garbage instead of my usual straightforward bruiser archetype.

Going through my notes, trying to find anything in the partial matches.
Batlina? More of a put-upon caretaker.
Curtana? Still too much of a clueless dorkus.
Witch Moof has tricks, but she doesn't really do *subtle*, exactly.
Dahlia isn't really tricky, she's just playful.

...This better not end up being the doll.

A portrait I got of Aisedza Farrwilfsyn, my FFXIV character. Done by @teknicolortiger@twitter.com, who always knocks anything I give her so far out of the park that it gets sent into low-earth orbit.

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