Via Mr. X Stitch, one of my favorite crafty blogs, why not take your cross stitching mega-sized and yarnbomb a chain-link fence? I positively love this idea and lucky for me, my front yard is enclosed by about 15 feet of 3'-high chain link! I could make my house number much more noticeable, or I could do a rotating installation depending on the season and/or holiday. 

I suppose, if I really wanted to be ambitious, I could spend the rest of 2014 cross-stitching a tetris game onto my fence, moving one square each day and taking a photo, and then animating all the photos at the end of the year in celebration of Tetris' 30th birthday.

But like I said, that would be ambitious, and this is me we're talking about. I'll put up photos of what I do get around to doing for sure!

A few days ago this cross-stitch popped up in my Instagram feed. What's not to love!? The best part was that she made two of these, so side by side, it was like THE SONG WAS PLAYING IN MY HEAD whaaaat?

I knew my innernette buddy Kelly made cute pins under the moniker Teeny Tiny Tantrums, but I didn't know she was a wicked cross stitching sassmouth, too. Naturally I had to poke around her Etsy shop and see what else she had been up to lately. A whole lot of awesome, 'tuderiffic* needleworks (some of which are pictured below). Hey, she does commissions, too! You could be a patron of the arts, just like the Medicis, but without all the open sewers of the Renaissance and the syphilitic fun that ensues!

Kelly, for pouring all of your sassy heart into your crafts, Sews Before Bros salutes you!

*yeah, you like that? Just made it up. You can have it, just credit me. 

I don't know Morse Code, and therefore it's easy for me to suspend my disbelief and hope that this is part of the message that was painstakingly stitched into the inner border of this WWII-era cross stitch:

Actually, the truth is not that far off. This cross stitch, crafted by Major Alexis Casdagli, a British military officer kept prisoner by Nazis during the Second World War, contains secret messages in Morse Code.  That's right, sprinkled liberally in between those swastikas and sickle & hammers are the phrases "Fuck Hitler" and "God Save the King." Casdagli also stitched a number of other samplers during his four years in captivity; among them, an entire letter to his 11 year-old son Tony back in England. It was the first word the boy and his mother had heard of his father since his capture more than six months earlier in Crete: 

Today, Tony is a celebrated needleworker in his own right who has exhibited at London's Victoria and Albert Museum.

I'd be hard pressed to find a single piece more emblematic of subversive mischief. There is, of course, the obvious message of resistance against the artist's Nazi captors, weighted heavily by the enormous audacity it required. Hidden though they were in code, expressing such sentiments was still a significant risk to take. Morse Code didn't exactly require the Enigma Machine to figure out. Casdagli was essentially taking the gamble that at no point during his work on the piece, or at any time after it was finished, would a German officer notice the little dots and dashes forming the border and realize the middle finger hidden therein. Far more than a casual utterance or even a hastily scrawled note, Casdagli's sentiment was built slowly and patiently, and far more irascibly, then the other paths of expressive resistance he could have chosen to take. 

But delving below the surface of such a cut-and-dry totem, we also find an artist who challenges and blends traditional gender roles in an era when such roles were strictly enforced. With the further complication of war, gender differences were hyper-extended: men went out in the mud to grapple and kill, while women tended the hearth and children while waiting innocently and patiently for their weary husbands and sons to return from the horrors of the battlefield. The transportation of one man from the large, noisy chaos of combat to the minute and studious concentration of quietly stitching away on what his peers would likely call "women's work" is an evocative one indeed.

Like a proverbial flower shoot growing slowly but determinedly from a scarred and barren landscape, Casdagli's art can also appreciated far more poetically as the epitome of beauty thriving amidst destruction, rebirth amongst death. As German soldiers were perpetuating atrocities against Casdagli's fellow Prisoners of War, as well as millions of Jewish, LGBTQ, & Roma people and political prisoners, art and resistance stayed alive. It only stands to reason that hope did, too. 

Casdagli, who had undoubtedly been instructed by the British military in how to be resourceful and creative in order to ensure his survival, pulled different-colored threads from pyjamas and other articles of his fellow prisoners' clothing to create the vibrant contrasts seen in many of his prison-era pieces. Some might find it odd that this would be how a military man applied his resourcefulness, but I would beg the question of how one defines 'survival.' Beyond the physical needs of food, water, shelter, and sleep, what other amenities must humans go to extraordinary lengths to attain in order to be seen as 'surviving?' We already know that humans need mental and emotional stimulation in order to live and thrive; do we not also need the beauty of art and the release of creation in order to exist? Major Casdagli definitely did: