Designer Hate #1: Heaven and Earth Designs (HAED)

It seems like the popular thing to do is to fawn and drool over designers who, pursuant to a previous post, own a copy of PC Stitch and use it to its maximum potential. Which is shitty. One of the most egregious offenders in this category is, in my opinion, Heaven and Earth Designs. Which abbreviates to “HAED,” but some morons call it “HEAD” for short. (And giggle, I’m sure, but that’s another rant for another day.)

First of all, their website pisses me off. I hate the Papyrus font, and am inherently inclined to distrust anyone who uses it. Papyrus is sort of a shortcut to convey the message, “Look at me, I’m arty and so very deep and shit, and if you don’t GET ME, then it’s ALL YOUR FAULT! Also I like to write poetry and post shitty Dave Matthew Band lyrics in my AIM profile and away messages.”

HAED claims it’s not computer generated, and this may well be, but the designs all look like hammered shit to me. Maybe I’m just not down with all the come-hither-fuck-me faeries, demented pink half-unicorn cats, and white tigers in space.

Yes, you read that correctly. TIGERS IN SPACE.

I’m all for shitty fantasy art if it’s what makes you happy, but I’m not going to fall all over myself to buy these charts, much less stitch them. I’m following the progress on a HAED design in another cross stitch community, and…it’s leaving me flat. Her workmanship is good, like it always is, but every time she posts an update, everyone is falling all over themselves to say, “Holy crap, that’s so PRETTY!” and “OMG U r Soooooo AWESUM!!!111″ Yeah, it’s nice, but…

…tigers in space. I can’t get over that.

Fucking up your cross stitch projects.

I fuck up my cross stitch projects all the time. I’m not proud of it, but I will definitely admit that it’s the case. Why am I so reluctant to embrace my extreme fucking-up-things skills?

I blame Martha Stewart, Rachael Ray, and anyone else who espouses the modern female aesthetic of “having it all, 100% of the time!” It’s not enough that modern women are supposed to be ultimate domestic goddesses, keeping their houses clean and pleasant for everyone all the time; ninjas in the kitchen, cooking meals that are healthy, delicious, nutritious, and pretty to look at; ambitious career women, who just can’t wait to climb right up the corporate ladder; and complete whores in bed, who are ready to Please Their Man in any way possible. Not only do we need to DO all these things, but we also need to be REALLY FUCKING GOOD at them!

You know what I say to that? Fuck that shit.

I’d rather spend my free time doing cross stitch than cleaning my bathroom until you can eat a meal off the toilet seat. I’d rather do almost anything else than the dishes, to Spencer’s eternal chagrin. (”Do you leave these all week so I can do them on the weekends?” he asks. Yes. Yes I do.) And dinner is inevitably a haphazard affair, cobbled together from leftovers and the occasional brain-dead-easy toss-stuff-in-a-bowl salad.

Hell, I set an alarm in the morning, and still I never manage to get to work completely on time.

Being perfect is exhausting, and demoralizing. What happens when you’ve built your life on perfection and you inevitably fuck something up, because you’re human? It can cause a serious crisis.

The same thing happens when I’m working on a cross stitch project. I try to count as best I can, but sometimes, I fuck up. Never has this been more apparent than when I started my big-ass project (the one I referenced in the earlier post). I fucked up an entire section by miscounting by one stitch.

What did I do about it, you ask? Well, I cried, because I’m like that; and then I resolved to do better in the future. That’s about all you can do. And now that the project’s farther along, you can’t even tell that something went wrong.

Don’t beat yourself up when you fuck something up, whether it’s cross stitch or life. Insisting on perfection, whether it’s from yourself, your hobbies, your significant other, or your kids, is only going to leave you neurotic and disappointed. Flaws are what make us human, and as long as we learn from our mistakes, we change and grow as people.

I hate PC Stitch.

It seems like any jackoff with a copy of PC Stitch and their own pet lame-ass fantasy “artist” can call themselves a cross-stitch designer. I’m fed up with seeing shitty photo conversion charts selling for $30+ on websites like Ye Olde Mystick Crosse Stitche.com, and the idiots who post pictures of their photo-converted designs and expect pats and accolades for something that looks like hammered crap.

It takes way more effort to design a good cross stitch chart than simply pushing a button on a computer program. You actually need a good sense of what colors go where and what stitches work with one another. I know it doesn’t matter so much when you’re talking about regular-ass cross stitches, but some of the really complicated fancy sampler stitches require serious coordination. I have a serious amount of respect for any decent cross stitch designer who works hard and comes up with charts that look good.

The major reason why those photo-conversion charts suck, however, has to do with the sheer number of colors. Since real life is brilliant and multicolored and pretty fucking beautiful, a photo can have millions of subtle shades inside it. The photo-to-cross-stitch process doesn’t know how to handle those subtleties, so you end up with the computer making decisions about what colors are important where. Computers are awesome, but they’re no substitute for human artistic judgment. So you get a 3″ x 5″ photo chart that calls for something like 100+ random-ass colors.

Additionally, those charts with 100+ colors takes a long-ass time to stitch. Don’t argue this with me; I’m embroiled in a project that takes 106 colors and after working on it for five years, I’m not even half done. But when you’re stitching a photo-conversion chart that hasn’t been color-corrected, the final product ends up looking flat, unrealistic, and generally like total shit. How can you justify spending your time and money on something that looks horrible and flat when it’s all done? I would be pissed as hell if I spent even two weeks on something that looked as flat and terrible as some of the “photo-realistic” charts that are out there.

Real designers go to great lengths to make sure that the final design is something that’s actually stitchable and doesn’t have a bajillion color changes all in a small space (unless the design really does call for that). The final goal is always to have something that’s actually capable of being created, and that doesn’t look like hammered crap when it’s done. So when you plug your picture in from wherever-the-fuck you get it, if you don’t have the ability to run that kind of human color-correction, you’re going to end up with something super complicated, hard to stitch, and shitty-looking.

Additionally: don’t trust a cross-stitch company with “photo-realistic charts” if they don’t show you a picture of a chart when they’re showing you what the finished product looks like. My bias is showing here, but Golden Kite does a good job of this. You can actually see that the picture is a picture of the chart and not just of the picture itself. Other designers don’t do this and only show you pictures of the picture. Demand to see the colorized chart and you’ll save yourself a lot of time and hassle.

But hey, if you want to spend a million hours stitching yourself an orange Mona Lisa because the chart was $10, knock your dumb-ass self out.

No, it’s not fucking needlepoint.

Cross stitch and needlepoint are two completely different things. It really bothers me when some wall-humping idiot comes up to me in public when I’m working on a cross stitch project and says, “Hurr hurr, is that needlepoint? My grandma used to do that!”

NO, YOU ASSHOLE, IT’S TOTALLY DIFFERENT.

Now obviously I don’t actually say something like that, because I am fundamentally a nice person and don’t feel that it’s necessary to be rude to total strangers in public, because then I would run a high risk of getting smacked in the mouth for no reason, and Spencer would need to choke a bitch as a result, and it would just not be pretty. But seriously, it bugs me.

I don’t expect Somedude McRandom on the street to have a working knowledge of the fiber arts, let alone be able to distinguish between the different types of fiber arts that exist. But maybe he could say something like, “Hey, that looks really neat. What is it?” which is a question that I am always happy to answer.

Please don’t confuse this with my natural ability to be antisocial and misanthropic, because, you know, I definitely have that in spades. I don’t think that anyone would really get pissed off about polite questions about their chosen hobby, about which they are probably fairly passionate. I don’t know shit about rocketry, or shooting things, or woodworking, or animal husbandry, but if I found someone who was engaged in any one of these pursuits, I would probably, you know, ask them nice questions about it.

I guess sometimes people are just trying to make a connection with others, or find a way to make something foreign and weird relatable to their own experiences.

What pisses me off more, though, is the tone of condescension that often runs through these inquiries. The implication that “My grandma did that; you’re doing that; therefore you’re old and uncool like my grandma.” I know a lot of cool grandmas. Old Grandma Hardcore is one of them, for example. But seriously — don’t ask me about my hobby if you’re just going to make fun of me. That makes you a total asshole.

Cross stitch is the bastard stepchild of modern crafting.

For my opening rant, I’m going to share with you how cross stitch takes a backseat to most modern crafts, by using stereotypes, caps lock, and some cursing. If these things offend you, well, then, that’s your own fucking problem.

When you think of knitting, what comes to mind? I think of some hipster girl with half a multicolored scarf sticking out of her messenger bag. She’s making it for her whiny boyfriend, or maybe for a member of his equally whiny band. Maybe she’s wearing a bandanna in her hair, or some of those fucking trendy black-rimmed glasses. Either way, the message is: Knitting is cool, because cool people like it! And when you think of crochet, what comes to mind? Probably the same fucking thing, except substitute “scarf” for “afghan;” “boyfriend” for “girlfriend;” and “fucking trendy black-rimmed glasses” for “kickin’ crocheted headscarf that in no way makes her look like an old woman.”

Side note — Dear lesbians who don’t read this blog (because no one reads this blog): Don’t send me angry emails about how your sexuality has nothing whatsoever to do with your choice of needlework. I’m not trying to piss you off specifically, I’m just making a fucking point.

Anyway, how about cross stitch? Grandmothers in rocking chairs, or that crazy fat woman at your workplace who has about ten cats and no significant other. Her cube is probably decorated with motivational posters and little framed cross stitch pieces that say things like “There’s no such thing as too much chocolate!” or “My cats are my kids!” or some shit like that.

An unfair stereotype, you think? I posit that probably about 75% of cross stitch devotees do one, if not all, of these things. Young, hip people don’t do cross stitch for one major reason –

IT TAKES TOO MUCH FUCKING TIME.

Not only do you need to make one complete stitch for the base part of the X, you need to do it again going the other fucking way! Two stitches to make one complete cross stitch — I guess that’s just too fucking much for some people.

Now, the time aspect is one of the things that I love most about cross stitch, because to me, the time you spend on something is what makes it really worthwhile. I’m also a big fan of delayed gratification and working hard at something for a while before it pays off — that must be why I went to grad school. But seriously, though, it takes a long-ass time before cross stitch projects really begin to look like what they’re supposed to look like, and in today’s fast-paced instant-gratification society, that can be tough to deal with. In contrast, you can knit a scarf in a couple of days, if you really want to. And there’s a reason that the “Mile-a-Minute” afghan pattern is so fucking popular.

Another thing that I love about cross stitch is the Zen-like meditation aspect of it. It can be enormously soothing to take a pile of random thread and slowly turn it into something orderly and beautiful. (Yes, yes, you can do this with knitting and crochet, too.) There’s something about those little Xs marching across the cloth that speaks to my sense of order and propriety. Maybe I’m secretly a pointillist.

What I’m suggesting is that if you’re at all interested in fiber arts of any type, try cross stitch out. You might discover that you really like it. At least give it a shot before going back to knitting your subversive whatever-the-fuck-you’re- making projects.

Everyone needs an intro…

Cross stitch is my favorite hobby. However, some of the things about it really make me angry.

I hope to begin cataloging them here.