Project Recap [Singapore]

At some point during the summer, we made a multiple trip[s] to craft stores to pick up cross stitch and framing supplies. On one of those trips, I picked up the floss for a dragon project still to come for a Cornell friend and while I was at it, the floss for this project of landmarks in Singapore. The concept is based on the designer Satsuma Street’s “Pretty Little” cities series, but she doesn’t have Singapore, so my pattern came from Awesome Pattern Studio, who also designed the Acadia pattern I did last year.

Similarly to the Acadia pattern, this one was provided as a pdf in several different versions. I like using the version with the symbols in the color of the floss. The only drawback is that it becomes difficult to see the symbol with very light colors, but you can either zoom way in or check a different version of the pattern. There was one questionable symbol choice, with two triangles that were mirror images of each other being used for two oranges, but there was just enough difference between the darker and lighter orange to make it not too terrible. Otherwise the pattern was clear and easy to follow. It used only full cross stitches, no fractional stitches or backstitching. There were 18 colors, none of which needed more than 1 skein. The color with the most stitches was 550 (very dark violet), with 827 stitches, and the color with the least was 165 (very light moss green) at 120 stitches.

I started the project right after finishing the birth announcement in August and finished in the middle of October for an elapsed time of 53 days. According to the provided stitch count table, there are approximately 6700 stitches, giving an average of about 125 stitches per day. At its tallest and widest, the project measures 114 x 92 stitches, or 8.14” x 6.57” on 14 count fabric. Mine measures 8.13” by 6.31”, so it’s just a little short. Something different I did for this project was to stitch it on 14 count Fiddler’s cloth rather than Aida. Fiddler’s cloth is similar to Aida in its structure, but instead of being 100% cotton, it’s a blend of fibers (some sites say 50% cotton, 42% polyester, and 8% linen), and is supposed to look rustic. I thought it would be interesting to use for this pattern, which is fairly modern, with a lot of bright colors, and I do like how the contrast between the fabric and pattern turned out.

As best as I can tell, the buildings/landmarks featured are the Singapore Flyer, an observation wheel; the Prima Tower, which housed a revolving restaurant on top of a grain tower from 1977 until 2020 (thanks, Covid); the Merlion, Singapore’s lion-headed, fish-bodied mythical mascot; the ArtScience Museum, featuring exhibits that combine art, science, culture, and technology; Marina Bay Sands, the boat/spaceship hotel made (more?) famous by Crazy Rich Asians; and Gardens by the Bay, with its Flower Dome and Cloud Forest conservatories and Supertree Grove. I haven’t been able to identify the rest of the buildings; they mostly look like what skyscrapers tend to look like. With all the different elements and colors in it, this was a fun project to stitch, and whenever I get around to framing basically everything I’ve stitched so far, this one will go up somewhere around the house.

Summery Summary

A few last notes on how I spent my summer:

We baked a black forest cake, molasses cookies, and focaccia. The black forest cake had issues with the cake – we overwhipped the egg whites and they didn’t fold into the batter super well – though the whipped cream and sour cherry filling were good. I’m still looking for a really good chocolate cake recipe (I also haven’t found my go to brownie recipe). I’ve baked the molasses cookies a half dozen times now, so those were fine. The focaccia was another first time bake, and it seemed to work. Maybe the crumb structure could have been a little more open, but it rose okay and tasted good. It was very crispy right after baking and softened up overnight.

Focaccia

I cross stitched a birth announcement that I have no use for right now, and started another project featuring landmarks in Singapore. While doing so, I made it to episode 113 (out of 141) of campaign 2 of Critical Role, but I’m now stalled around episode 124 because I’m currently not cross stitching while trying to write somewhere between half and most of a book in a month (hello, NaNoWriMo).

We hiked some nearby trails and state parks, saw sheep at a farm, and attended an outdoor art installation at a local land preserve. Despite living where we’ve been for over a decade, we hadn’t done much exploration of some of the local trails just a few miles from our house. Most community trails aren’t anything super amazing to write home about, but they’re close, and they’re great for a quick afternoon or weekend hike. They range from a mile or two up to over five miles, and there are even a few trails that connect to or loop through surrounding towns. One day when we had some time to spare outside of Boston, we paid a visit to the Mount Auburn Cemetery, resting place of Dorothea Dix, Bernard Malamud, Henry Cabot Lodge, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Isabella Stewart Gardner, Buckminster Fuller, Winslow Homer, and many others, and then walked to a park close by.

Boston skyline from the Mount Auburn cemetery

Thanks to the public library, I got to solve some puzzles for free, including one from the world’s hardest puzzle series. Those are the ones that are double sided and cut so that the pieces have no “front” or “back” side. Last time was the 1001 dalmatians that took 1001 nights to solve. This time was a jungle scene that was definitely harder than a “normal” puzzle but nowhere near as difficult as the dalmatians. We also did a Massachusetts puzzle from White Mountain puzzles, a chocolate puzzle that we picked up for free, and a Star Wars puzzle, another free acquisition.

Additionally, sometime in the summer I found out that the World Jigsaw Puzzle Championship is a thing. There, one of the rounds in the competition is to fix a 500 piece puzzle in less than 90 minutes, with the fastest puzzlers completing the puzzle in less than half an hour. I was curious to try it for myself, so I attempted it first with a puzzle of a giant girl holding a jump rope standing over a bridge with some buildings in the background. There weren’t many colors or obvious features in this puzzle, so I didn’t end up finishing this one in 90 minutes. What I had done in that time is shown in the figure below, and I took another half hour to complete it. I tried again with a puzzle of a city street, and this time I finished the puzzle in 1:28:32 with just under a minute and a half to spare.

Jigsaw puzzles - clockwise from top left: world's hardest jigsaw puzzle - jungle animals edition, chocolate, giant jump rope girl, and city street

Although the public library here doesn’t have as many non-book/video offerings as the Ann Arbor District Library, they do have a telescope, which we borrowed to try out. Our constellation identification wasn’t super successful, but we got a pretty good look at the moon as it waxed over a period of a couple weeks. I can actually identify craters in photos taken with my 250mm lens, but the telescope had even more magnification than my camera, so that was cool. And finally, we repainted most of our sad looking deck, at least as much as we could until we ran out of paint.

Oh, hi, Ohio

A couple months ago I embarked on some business travel to visit research collaborators in Cincinnati, Ohio. While I was there, I figured I might as well enjoy some of the city, so I had planned to visit the zoo and ended up getting to stop by the art museum as well. I flew into the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport (CVG) in Hebron, Kentucky. The airport was bigger than I expected, with just under fifty gates spread out across two terminals. From the airport, I took a TANK (Transit Authority of Northern Kentucky) bus into Cincinnati, then a Metro bus up to the zoo.

The Cincinnati Zoo is a decent size – 75 acres, about twice Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo’s 35 acres and similar to the Singapore Zoo’s 69 acres – with variable admissions costs depending on projected attendance; if possible, buy your tickets as far in advance as you can. I spent a little over three hours there, including a late lunch, but wouldn’t have minded an hour or two more if I hadn’t had to leave to get to my hotel. When I visited, because it was already fall and past peak season, not all the dining options were available, and some of the shows and other activities weren’t running.

There were most of the usual suspects you expect to see when you go to a zoo, including zebras, flamingos, penguins, giraffes, and a variety of apes, birds, and reptiles. A number of the African animals that wouldn’t eat and/or gore each other to death got to hang out together, separated from the lions, which were surprisingly active, by a nice deep moat. I also got to see African penguins (by the flamingos), little blue penguins (next to the kangaroos), and some rockhopper and king penguins in the Birds of the World building. Somehow, I managed to miss the elephants and didn’t have time for Cat Canyon or Gorilla World, but I covered most of the rest of the zoo, and a fair number of the animals were out/active, probably because it wasn’t 8000 degrees out like the last time I was at the zoo in Chicago.

Clockwise from top left: lion, ostrich, gibbon, grey crowned crane

One of the reasons I decided to visit the Cincinnati Zoo is that it’s home to Fiona, the hippo who became famous after she was born six weeks premature at 29 pounds (baby hippos typically weigh 100 pounds) and the zoo started posting videos about her. She now also has a baby brother, Fritz, but the family was still being introduced out of the public eye at the time of my visit. At Hippo Cove, when I got there, only one hippo was out in the public part of their home, and I think it was Fiona, so I did get to see her at least. Overall, it was a pretty nice zoo, not too crowded and with a good variety of animals. The layout was okay, though there was some backtracking required to see some of the exhibits. I did have a bit of trouble finding the African penguins, and to see the little blue penguins I had to take a one-way path through the kangaroo exhibit, but for the most part there’s an outer main path that passes by most of the animals.

Little blue penguin

Later in the trip, my former coworker and I went to the Cincinnati Art Museum. Admission is free, though special events may be ticketed. The museum contains a variety of paintings, sculptures, pottery, photographs, etc. from past and present around the world, though it’s mostly American and European art. There were Greek vases, a mummy, teapots, a couple Andy Warhols, a multitude of oil paintings of old English nobles, coffee urns generously donated by P&G, and plenty more. One of the more unique areas of the museum featured works by artists who were either from or spent a portion of their career in Cincinnati; it was interesting to see some more local art that was directly related to the city. We were at the museum for a couple hours, which was enough time to see everything pretty quickly. If you took more time reading about and admiring each piece, you could be there for another hour or two, but I’m not a huge art history person and the museum was closing anyway.

Other highlights of my trip: 1) I did get to try Graeter’s ice cream. Graeter’s is a Cincinnati-based chain that handmakes its ice cream using a small-batch “French pot” process that results in denser ice cream. I tried their Boldly Bearcat flavor, a mascarpone ice cream with Oreos and chocolate chips named for the University of Cincinnati Bearcats. It was good, but I didn’t find it that creamy, which could just have been the flavor I chose, and I would still argue I like Cornell Dairy ice cream better. 2) The hotel had a magical pancake machine. With a single press of a button, you could receive two pancakes within minutes. (When you press the button, pancake batter is squirted onto a conveyor belt and the pancakes cook as they travel down the belt before being deposited onto a plate.) 3) The airport had steamboat models, a plane, and animal skeletons from the Cincinnati Museum Complex, which includes history, children’s, and natural history and science museums.

Clockwise from top left: modern art, teapots, pancake machine, mastodon skeleton at the airport

Project Recap [Balloon birth announcement]

Sometime after I moved back to New England, I was digging around in the basement closet when I uncovered a cross stitch kit. I hadn’t stitched anything since February, so I figured I’d give the kit a try, never mind the fact that neither I nor anyone I knew needed a birth announcement. The kit is Simplicity’s Balloon Birth Announcement (05514), featuring a circle of hearts and flowers with balloons, a duck, and two bunnies. It was purchased from the Windsor Button Shop for $4.25, marked down from $8.50. Since the purchase of the kit, Simplicity has been acquired/sold at least twice, and I believe the cross stitch portion of their business is now managed by Dimensions. Windsor Button, if I found the right shop, closed in 2013 after 77 years of business.

The kit contained a 12” square piece of white 14-count Aida, 100% cotton floss in all required colors, a needle, and the paper chart and instructions. The pattern required the more typical full cross stitches and backstitches as well as lazy daisies and French knots. The chart was easy to read, though I still can’t find where/if they marked the number of strands you were supposed to use for any of the stitches. I ended up doing one strand backstitch and lazy daisies and two strand cross stitches and French knots, which worked okay. Some of the lighter colors are a bit light worked with one strand, but I think increasing the strand count would have made it too crowded and the flowers/leaves would have lost definition. They did have instructions for how to do all the stitches, but I ended up looking up YouTube videos for the lazy daisies and French knots just to make sure I was doing them (mostly) correctly.

Additionally, like a decent number of kits, the floss came in a bundle with no labels. This kit doesn’t have too many colors, so they can get away with it, but two of the yellows are very hard to differentiate it you’re not in strong daylight, then the darkest yellow looks orange and the orange is very reddish. Other than that, the quality of the Aida, floss, and needle seemed good. I did make a mistake in centering, so it’s not quite exactly centered, but they provided a 12” x 12” piece of fabric and the pattern is about 8” in diameter so there’s still enough margin on all sides for framing.

I started working near the end of June and finished shortly after the middle of August (June 22-August 19), so it took me just under two months. [I actually finished the cross stitching in about two weeks and it took the rest of the time for all the other stitches, including a solid week of just French knots.] Because of the backstitching/lazy daisies/French knots, there was a lot more stopping/starting threads and travelling across the back than I usually do, However, I did enjoy using/learning stitches other than cross stitches, even the French knots. I might even try an embroidery project sometime. As usual, I substituted double running stitch for the backstitch and I also changed some of the backstitching to make it less blocky. Other than that, I followed the pattern as written, and overall, I thought it was well put together and I like the finished product more than I thought I would, though I still don’t know what I’m going to do with it.

Parker River National Wildlife Refuge

To close out astronomical summer in the northern hemisphere, we paid a visit to the Parker River National Wildlife Refuge on Plum Island, off the northeast coast of Massachusetts. The island is named for the beach plum shrubs that grow on its dunes, and the wildlife refuge is managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Entry costs $5 for a day pass for a car, or it’s free if you have a national parks pass. Parker River is popular with birdwatchers, and it contains a number of beach access points, lookouts, and trails throughout the island. There are also a couple of canoe routes that allow you to get up close and personal with the marshes, but we didn’t explore any of that this time.

You enter the wildlife refuge at the north end of Plum Island, and the road runs roughly north to south up and down the island. Along the road, there are seven numbered parking lots and several other pullouts for lesser attractions. We started at the first, and northernmost, parking lot, which serves as one of the main access points for the beach. The beach was quiet, though not deserted, with a few dozen people spread out across the sand. A couple people were braving the water, but most were walking along the beach, fishing, picnicking, or just enjoying the sun. We walked a ways down the beach, hung out with seagulls, and examined dead crabs before finding a spot in the sand for our peanut butter and jam sandwich and banana lunch.

Ring-billed gull

After lunch, we returned to the parking lot and started making our way down through the rest of the refuge. We stopped briefly at the Salt Pannes Wildlife Observation Area and the North Pool Overlook, a pullout on the road and a small parking lot respectively. At the salt pannes, we saw a wildlife, a lone swan with the tip of its beak submerged (likely a mute swan but it could theoretically have been a trumpeter), and at the North Pool was a family of mute swans, two adults and four juveniles that were adult-sized but still brown-feathered. Our next big stop was at the Hellcat Wildlife Observation Area (parking lot 4), which features a boardwalk trail and observation tower.

A short distance from the parking lot, you can turn off the boardwalk and cross a dike to reach the observation tower, which overlooks the North Pool to the north, the Bill Forward Pool to the south, and salt marshes to the west. Here we found the largest concentration of bird photographers, fully equipped with cameras, tripods, and telephoto lenses larger than my arm. I had my, relatively speaking, compact 55-250mm lens with me, which on a crop sensor camera is at the bottom end of the range you need to get started birding. I did still manage to capture a bunch of mallards, some yellowlegs, mute swans, a great blue heron, and an unidentified duck-ish bird. Back on the boardwalk, we made a loop through the forest, with trail spurs that led to views of the ocean and marsh. Including all the spurs, the trail is about 1.3 miles, plus another ~1000 feet out and back to the observation tower.

Across the marshes

View from the Hellcat observation tower - North Pool

Shortly after the Hellcat parking lot, the refuge road stops being paved, which ranges from “slightly annoying” to “I hope my engine doesn’t fall out.” It seemed worse going south than north, but we and the car survived. We made stops to hike the Pines and Stage Island Trails (slightly before parking lot 5 and parking lot 6). The Pines Trail is a quick 0.3 miles in the woods with a marsh overlook. The Stage Island Trail is 0.7 miles one way to the Ipswich Bluffs. Along the way, you see marshes, a couple pools, and across the Plum Island Sound to Great Neck. I found a group of yellowlegs at one of the pools, but unfortunately I wasn’t carrying a ruler to determine whether they were 10 or 14 inches tall, so I’m not sure if they’re greater or lesser yellowlegs (or a mixed group).

Yellowlegs

Our final stop was at the last parking lot before Sandy Point State Reservation, a Massachusetts state park. There was another observation tower looking out across an expanse of waving reeds/grass and beach access, which we used to get one last look at the ocean before heading home. I also got my last bird photos of the day, of a sandpiper of some kind. My best guess is a semipalmated sandpiper. We ended up spending a little over 5 hours at Parker River, which included lunch, some time on the beach, and all of the main hikes, but not playing on the beach/in the ocean or extended birdwatching stops, so depending on who you’re with and your interests, your timing and choices of activities may vary.

Field of grass

(Possible) semipalmated sandpiper