Teleidoscope

Tue, Nov 28, 2006

Kitsunebi

Posted at 6:35 pm MST to Technology

I am very frustrated at the moment. I suddenly have lots of creative energy, and it wants to go in every direction at once. Writing this blog feels good. There are stories that want to be written. And lots of other projects that were planned or started and then set aside seem to want attention.

And I really should start cleaning the apartment and packing and generally getting ready to move home 10 days from now.

Among the set aside projects:

• lots of needlework kits of various sorts
• trying to learn watercolor pencils so that I can create the images I want for the net of mirrors
• my two original cross stitch designs
• figuring out and writing out the music for Wilde Jagd

I need to prioritize.

I am going to keep up with this blog. So far I have averaged one post per day since the second day of posting, after the big batch of initial posts, and I hope to keep to that.

I need to start writing the stories out, because if I don't I will fall back into writer's block.

And I will plan to return to occasional work on my original cross-stitch pieces.

The smaller of the original designs is called "Kitsunebi", which is the Japanese word for foxfire. It is a picture of a Japanese nine-tailed spirit-fox which I created using a free software package called Kxstitch to generate the stitching chart.

I had stitched the fox's body and a couple of the tails before my medical problems in 2005. I set it aside then, when the mammogram came back questionable, and somehow have never gotten back to working on it. Now I'm finding myself annoyed by the fact that it's stalled, which isn't quite the same as wanting to work on it, but close.

One of the nice things about my shift from SuSE to Kubuntu Linux was that Kxstitch comes prepackaged for Debian/Ubuntu: when I originally ran it (on RedHat/Fedora on my previous laptop) I had to build it myself, and I never quite got around to building a 64-bit SuSe version. Now I have my design tool back without having to fuss with it.

My other original design is too large to be portable, or to have any hope of finishing it in a reasonable amount of time when I'm also working on other projects. But I will write about it and show the design at an appropriate time next month.

The Kitsunebi design is shown below the cut.

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