on MrXStitch.com again!

I am proud to say that my work was again featured on MrXStitch.com! It's an absolute honor to be recognized! This time, it was for my cross stitch of the Scooby Crew that I made for Kate's birthday. As an added bonus, this picture made it to Explore on Flickr!

I based the pattern on the MiniPops version of the Scooby Doo gang and then mapped it out myself using Excel (instead of graph paper). Once it was done, the background was too white and the gang lost some of the details, so I did a half-stitch in grey to define the background a bit more.

I didn't add Scooby himself, because our gang doesn't have a dog (we have 3 birds, 2 toads, and a cat between us) but we call ourselves the Scooby Crew and even dressed as them last Halloween!

Flickr + Twitter = Love

Just in case you weren't aware (I just learned this myself) Flickr now has a way to integrate with Twitter, so that you don't have to use a 3rd party URL shortener (like TinyURL) or another photo repository like Twitpic.

Use this link to activate & get all the details: http://www.flickr.com/groups/flickrtwitterbeta/

I personally love this for a couple of reasons:

1. I can cross-post via email, which is handy for updating via cell phone. The subject line of the email is the tweet and the picture is posted to Flickr and assigned a shorter URL
2. The short URL comes from Flic.kr, so it's very clear where your link is pointing to (whereas with TinyURL or others, you can't tell 'til you've clicked)
3. I can tweet directly from Flickr, using the "Blog This" button - it shows your Twitter account as another blog that is enabled.
4. It shows the character count remaining for tweets via "Blog This"
5. Easily tweet other interesting photos using "Blog This" (this assumes that you have permission - this is a customizable setting that usually only your contacts or friends have enabled, but some people allow anyone to blog their photos)
6. Once people use the short URL to view my picture, they can instantly comment
7. PLUS Flickr tracks all the pertinent data about where your photo traffic is coming from -- so I can see how many views were from my tweet vs. search vs. friends just browsing. Very cool.