Ha, I totally got you, right? You were expecting more Constance but I fooled you! Hey, what’s a cliffhanger without a few cliffs to hang off of? Remind me to tell you sometime about Charles Dickens’ great-something grandson telling us about cliffhangers, but we will get back to the story next week.
Okay, fine, I’ll tell you now, though this wasn’t the point of this article. Charles Dickens’s great-something grandson1 decided to make part of his life be performing his grandsire’s work. Especially A Christmas Carol. One year in my early teens my mom pulled us out of school to attend a performance of his. She did this on occasion but rarely; when she did, we knew it was something she considered more important and educational than school. We went to a Galway concert once in similar circumstances for example. At this time, we went to a performance of his at the library that was aimed at kids and question-and-answers were available. Why it was mid-school-day I’m not sure; maybe it was a home-schoolers perfomance? Anyway, he talked about the process of writing and the process of his becoming a performer. I remember one anecdote where he told how he usually recited from his book but lost it one day so astonished himself by being able to perform it without the book. However, afterwards, one person expressed concern about his left arm- had he injured it? He hadn’t moved it the whole performance. Turns out he was so used to holding a book in that hand that he was accustomed to gesturing only with his right hand. He’d fixed that by the time he met us.
Anyway, cliffhangers! I remember him telling us about this every time I hear about cliffhangers. I’m going to paraphrase:
Imagine there’s a girl living in a seaside town. We’ll call her Elizabeth.2 She’s a beautiful girl and also has an odd quirk that she never trims her fingernails so they’re quite long. She also has a faithful dog that she likes to walk along the cliffs by the town. Elizabeth is dear friends with one man in town who she hopes will propose to her but there’s another man in town who hates her a lot. Well, one day Elizabeth is walking her dog along the cliffs when suddenly a gust of wind and an ill-placed rock send her tumbling off the edge! But thanks to her long fingernails, she manages to dig her hands into the soil and she’s dangling off over the sea and the sharp rocks below. Her faithful dog barks in terror and runs off to get help while *plink* one of her fingernails breaks off, loosening her hold. As she dangles, another *plink* comes, followed by another. The longer she hangs, the more fingernails break, faster as more of her weight rests on each one. But in the distance, getting louder, she hears the barks as her dog returns. Hopeful barks, as the dog has managed to find help! Only one fingernail holds her on as a shape looms above her. It might be the man who loves her or the man who hates her judging by the silhouette. He leans down out of the mist and…
That’s what we call a cliffhanger.
Anyway, what I was actually planning on putting in here are some free cross-stitch pdfs. I was fooling/learning around with some pixel art and, since cross-stitch is essentially slow analog pixel art, thought I’d convert them. Especially since this time I actually found an internet-based site called Stitch Fiddle that would convert the images for me. It took a little noodling even so; I wish I could just tell it “hey, check out this art I made in neat squares for your convenience with four or five colors; now give me a chart” but evidently I need to go into more work than that.3
That being said, here’s my art:
And the pdfs of the patterns:
- I remember him having more and darker hair. Well, it was years ago. ↩︎
- He really chose that name. My siblings all teased me about it. ↩︎
- Case in point, option 2, Origami Crane, does not have a thread chart. Sorry ’bout that. ↩︎
Intellectual Property of Elizabeth Doman
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