navel-gazing: An Eye for Quality
Ok, so. I wanted to write a post about why in the world I decided to embroider a podfic cover, and this isn't that post, but it's better than no post, so here we are.
Because the thing is, this podfic has been living in my head rent-free since sometime around March 2013, when only chapters 1-3 were posted. I'm a sucker for just-a-smidge-to-the-left AUs, and genderbending, and worldbuilding, and fleshing out underappreciated characters, and hurt/comfort, and embroidery, and most of all I'm always here for everyone-lives, and and and- what I'm getting at is this fic is my goddamn catnip. But also I just really love both the world it inhabits - my feelings about Lord of the Rings are, at this point, too strong and complicated for me to really be in the fandom, but The Hobbit is just close enough and yet different enough to still be enjoyable - and the world it evokes - familiar, in many ways, and unkind in familiar ways, but also kind and deeply loving - and I wanted to spend more time in that world. And the way I do that, left to my own devices, is through podfic.
So I knew I wanted to record it, and I waited patiently until it was done, and then I tried. And tried again. And again. And it never quite clicked. Which happens, so I (wistfully) laid it aside and moved on.
But I kept coming back. And then sometime in 2018 I needed a break from All the Stars, which was wonderful but also weirdly difficult to record - which, again, happens - and I decided to try recording An Eye for Quality again. And something clicked. I don't know if my recording had changed in the intervening time (probably) or if I was just in a different place (I was, literally and metaphorically), but it was the easiest podfic I've ever recorded. It just flowed right out. At one point I counted ten minutes go by without a flub, which is unheard of me. Even when I did flub though, and had to redo the line, I almost always only had to do so once. The voices came to me easily, and stuck easily. It all just- worked.
And then, while I was in the final round of editing, I realized that I still had to make a podfic cover. Or rather, I didn't *have* to, but I wanted to. But I had no ideas. Not a one.
I tried a few things, but none of them really felt right. For the amount of fun that I was having making this podfic, I wanted to also have fun with the cover, but the very elements of the story that I loved - the world building, the genderbending, the underappreciated characters - made it hard to put together a visual for the podfic.
And then, as I was bewailing this to the household, it occurred to me that Bella (genderbent!Bilbo) uses embroidery as a metaphor for her love. And I'm actually quite good at embroidery. Which brings us to the cover:
Technically speaking, by the way, this is scarletwork, the close sister of blackwork, itself a style of counted-thread or freehand embroidery thought to originate sometime in the 15th or 16th century (though I just sat in on a class that argued that Chaucer referred to blackwork, so *makes weighing motion*) and popular through around the end of the 17th century; it began to be revived in the early 20th century as part of a growing interest in handcrafts. Historically silk was usually used (this was a high-status item) on linen, but in the modern day a lot of people use cotton, which is a lot more accessible. However, I do have precisely three colors of embroidery silk, and I wanted to be a little extra (also silk is better if you're going to be picking out and redoing your work a bunch, which I knew going into this I would be doing).
Because if you're going to be extra why not be extra, the pattern is slightly adapted from this blackwork sampler at the V&A (if you download and enlarge the image you'll find two tiny flowers about two thirds of the way to the right and two thirds of the way down; that version has little squares along each side that just didn't look right at the threadcount I was working with).
The star/Arkenstone was, I must admit, unplanned. I knew better than to do the text first (always work the frame first!!!) and then I did the text first and then wasn't able to center the frame around the text properly. I had had little red stars to the right of "linelen" and the left of "read" because that text isn't actually centered either, but once the frame was in place it was clear that that was the larger problem. I put a large red star in, and then (only then! I had a bad case of tunnel vision) it occurred to me that the story had a honking massive gem in it, and maybe I could run with that and pretend this was all going according to plan. After a few false starts involving fancy metallic threads (they looked really good in person but photographed terribly) I ended up back at silk, but this time in blue, and I was done! A special cover that I spent way too much time fussing over, for a special podfic that I spent way too much time fussing over, but in the end I'm quite pleased with how both of them turned out :D
(the fact that this is getting posted right around the ten year anniversary of me first picking up a microphone and reading fic into it is accidental but hilarious)
Because the thing is, this podfic has been living in my head rent-free since sometime around March 2013, when only chapters 1-3 were posted. I'm a sucker for just-a-smidge-to-the-left AUs, and genderbending, and worldbuilding, and fleshing out underappreciated characters, and hurt/comfort, and embroidery, and most of all I'm always here for everyone-lives, and and and- what I'm getting at is this fic is my goddamn catnip. But also I just really love both the world it inhabits - my feelings about Lord of the Rings are, at this point, too strong and complicated for me to really be in the fandom, but The Hobbit is just close enough and yet different enough to still be enjoyable - and the world it evokes - familiar, in many ways, and unkind in familiar ways, but also kind and deeply loving - and I wanted to spend more time in that world. And the way I do that, left to my own devices, is through podfic.
So I knew I wanted to record it, and I waited patiently until it was done, and then I tried. And tried again. And again. And it never quite clicked. Which happens, so I (wistfully) laid it aside and moved on.
But I kept coming back. And then sometime in 2018 I needed a break from All the Stars, which was wonderful but also weirdly difficult to record - which, again, happens - and I decided to try recording An Eye for Quality again. And something clicked. I don't know if my recording had changed in the intervening time (probably) or if I was just in a different place (I was, literally and metaphorically), but it was the easiest podfic I've ever recorded. It just flowed right out. At one point I counted ten minutes go by without a flub, which is unheard of me. Even when I did flub though, and had to redo the line, I almost always only had to do so once. The voices came to me easily, and stuck easily. It all just- worked.
And then, while I was in the final round of editing, I realized that I still had to make a podfic cover. Or rather, I didn't *have* to, but I wanted to. But I had no ideas. Not a one.
I tried a few things, but none of them really felt right. For the amount of fun that I was having making this podfic, I wanted to also have fun with the cover, but the very elements of the story that I loved - the world building, the genderbending, the underappreciated characters - made it hard to put together a visual for the podfic.
And then, as I was bewailing this to the household, it occurred to me that Bella (genderbent!Bilbo) uses embroidery as a metaphor for her love. And I'm actually quite good at embroidery. Which brings us to the cover:
Technically speaking, by the way, this is scarletwork, the close sister of blackwork, itself a style of counted-thread or freehand embroidery thought to originate sometime in the 15th or 16th century (though I just sat in on a class that argued that Chaucer referred to blackwork, so *makes weighing motion*) and popular through around the end of the 17th century; it began to be revived in the early 20th century as part of a growing interest in handcrafts. Historically silk was usually used (this was a high-status item) on linen, but in the modern day a lot of people use cotton, which is a lot more accessible. However, I do have precisely three colors of embroidery silk, and I wanted to be a little extra (also silk is better if you're going to be picking out and redoing your work a bunch, which I knew going into this I would be doing).
Because if you're going to be extra why not be extra, the pattern is slightly adapted from this blackwork sampler at the V&A (if you download and enlarge the image you'll find two tiny flowers about two thirds of the way to the right and two thirds of the way down; that version has little squares along each side that just didn't look right at the threadcount I was working with).
The star/Arkenstone was, I must admit, unplanned. I knew better than to do the text first (always work the frame first!!!) and then I did the text first and then wasn't able to center the frame around the text properly. I had had little red stars to the right of "linelen" and the left of "read" because that text isn't actually centered either, but once the frame was in place it was clear that that was the larger problem. I put a large red star in, and then (only then! I had a bad case of tunnel vision) it occurred to me that the story had a honking massive gem in it, and maybe I could run with that and pretend this was all going according to plan. After a few false starts involving fancy metallic threads (they looked really good in person but photographed terribly) I ended up back at silk, but this time in blue, and I was done! A special cover that I spent way too much time fussing over, for a special podfic that I spent way too much time fussing over, but in the end I'm quite pleased with how both of them turned out :D
(the fact that this is getting posted right around the ten year anniversary of me first picking up a microphone and reading fic into it is accidental but hilarious)