CREATIVE: Getting My Craft On

The last couple of weeks has been met with a super urge to be rather crafty and get my hands messy. Be it playing around with lots of thread, paper, rooting through tins of vintage buttons to daydreaming about a whole variety of projects. If you follow me on Instagram you might already be aware of the million and one crafty projects I seem to have on the go at any one time (and perhaps be sick of me sharing them) but for those of you who haven't noticed them, or wanted more information, I thought it would be fun to do a little round up and see how I get along over the year ahead.

So we'll start with crocheting!

The last week has actually seen me picking up a crochet hook for the first time in a good couple of months. I go through fits and starts when it comes to crocheting, I don't really find that there is a lot that I want to do with this craft but when that urge comes along, I gotta roll with it.

My mam always loves to mail me vintage crochet patterns of doilies, table cloths and random house decor that was popular, I'm just a sucker for collecting all the patterns I will be honest because I have nightmares of them being thrown away and lost forever. That and I'm just a sucker.

Anyway ... knowing I have a pile of old crochet thread collected from estate sales, I thought I'd get around to getting back to crocheting some doilies. I guess you might have to have a vintage heart to still find a love and or need for doilies like I use them, but with all the vintage odds and ends we have around our house, they suit everything just swell. 

So I'm working on a small mat from a dressing set, it'll be about 12" in diameter once completed (pictured above) and comes from what appears to be a 1950's Penelope pattern booklet called Household Crochet.

Finished image source

Rolling with the crocheting urge, a crochet flower wreath has been on my must make list for far too many years to think about. I finally picked up a couple of unused Styrofoam wreaths at an estate sale last year and well, it was time to get cracking. Using this pattern from Red Heart, everything is just made up of a collection of different flowers, different colored yarns and vintage buttons. All second hand, all being reused which I love!

As for the cross stitching, that's going as well as ever. I've started rotating my projects, working on each for a week at a time to make sure non of them are getting neglected, which I'm guilty of doing when I get my head set on a piece that I'm really enjoying.

Finished image source

So I'm working on Flossie, a design from The Heart's Content. I don't normally tend to fall for stitching people even though such designs are rather popular in the stitching world. But Flossie always looked a fun piece, she's on the time consuming side with all the dress details, but I love how she's turning out. 

Finished image source

Taking me back to the seaside is my little harbor town piece that comes from issue 237 of Cross Stitch Collection. With mismatched houses, little fishing boats and smelly seagulls, every time I dig this piece out it takes me back to all the small fishing towns of North Yorkshire and everywhere else it could be around the UK coastline. Eventually it'll be hung up in our bathroom - once both are completed. Like Flossie, it's a slow piece to stitch, measuring 13" square there's a lot of detail going on, but it's cheerful and fun all the same. 

Finished image source.

Finally I gave in and added a third main piece into my rotation - a UK sampler by Emma Congdon from issue 214 of World of Cross Stitching Magazine. Again another bright and cheerful piece that reminds me of the homeland. It's such a fun design to stitch, I'm aiming to change some pieces around, I don't particularly like the "love" plate so I might add in some Yorkshire roses or make some reference to East Yorkshire and the like but I'm still on the fence about what I might do, or if I will.

With my cross stitching bag parked next to the sofa, it's a constant reminder of all the projects I would love to get done. I'm aiming to stitch an anniversary design for the MIL, lots more birthday and Christmas cards, there's a Little Red Riding Hood piece I've been eyeing and a super colorful "it's a wonderful life" design I'm itching to start. 

As always, there's more projects then I'll ever have time for!

Have you been getting your craft on lately?

Rachael

CREATIVE: A Room Without Books

Hunting around estate sales all the time, I often come across random old pieces and bits I gather to add to my craft collection. Basically a box of random odds and ends might one day might find a purpose and use. A couple of pages of perforated plastic being such a random thing. Perforated plastic seemed to be the tend of 1980's crafting, people would make magnets, tissue box covers, bookends you name it. It wasn't until I re-found a design for a bookmark stitched on such a plastic I thought about giving it a go myself and finding a more modern use for it.

The design, which originally appealed in the October 2014 edition of Cross Stitch Collection, was stitched upon black plastic with all white text. Unfortunately with my plastic being see-through there was a need to stitch in a background but also gave the perfect excuse to go through my thread scraps and get colorful. 

So my first cross stitch project of 2016 became a lesson in perforated plastic stitching of a quote to appeal to my bookworm and hoarder side. I have to admit, for such a small design it demanded more attention that I would have originally thought. Also stitching on plastic is apparently a bit of a pain, it turned out to be much more "floppy" than stitching on fabric and there is the added fun of it's ability to start snapping and breaking. Which it did, twice. So it's not perfect, it's been super-glued back in place at one point, but I was too invested with it at that point to give up. That and I still like how it turned out. 

Oh and that quote - "a room without books is like a body without a soul" is just an awesome excuse to decorate the house with books, don't you think?!

What have you been crafting lately?

Rachael

CREATIVE: Home Sweet Home

A couple of months ago, I made the most of our friends buying their first house and made it the perfect excuse to get around to trying out designing another cross stitch to give to them as a celebratory gift. The design was a whole collection of various ideas that have been flying around in my head for a while that just happened to flow out and work pretty well together. Pretty love hearts, cute fluffy clouds and variegated shades on the text. Not to mention the endless number of french knotted flowers. Finished off in a 6" embroidery hoop and all ready to hang.

I have to admit, I'm pleased as punch how this design turned out.

What have you been crafting lately?

CREATIVE: Dinobot, a Cross Stitched Poster

Everyone probably remembers the infamous Obama "Hope" poster for his 2008 presidential campaign, and everyone has seen countless variations using celebrities and so on in the same design. One such similar design was created for Dinobot, a character in the Transformers Beast Wars animated TV show from 1996. With Dinobot being one if not the favorite character of Joe's when it comes to the entire Transformers universe, it was time to turn it into a cross stitch design. 

So who the hell is Dinobot and why is he shouting honor around?!

If you're not familiar with Beast Wars, Dinobot may not be a character you're aware of (at least as an individual - groups of Dinobots did appear in the last Transformers movie but we don't talk about that urgh). Dinobot actually started out as a baddy - an aid to Megatron has they landed on what they believed was Earth. While Predacon (the baddies) Dinobot was ruled by his strong code of honor and lives to die gloriously in battle. In short Dinobot rebelled and joined the Maximal team lead by Optimus Primal. Eventually he gets his wish of dying a hero when he sacrifices himself to save a group of protohumans (hunter gatherers) from a Predacon onslaught. These hunter gatherers having observed and interacted with Transformers who happened to appear on their planet  so yes, you could say in this universe at least, Transformers helped the evolution of humans.

So, after transforming the poster into a pattern, the design was pretty much straight forward. Using only four colours was somewhat novel, I wasn't really sure how it would all look stitched up, perhaps turn out looking a bit too flat especially without any form of backstitching, but it turned out a lot better than I could have hoped. It's always awesome when that happens.

Three months and 9,920 stitches later, Dinobot is complete. It measures a little under 6 x 9 inches and self framed in a dirt cheap frame I picked up at an estate sale. Now to find a place for him alongside that other Transformers piece I stitched earlier this year.

And as for the recipient, Joe loves it. Which is the biggie.

CREATIVE: The Detroit Skyline

The idea of stitching a Detroit cityscape is one that's been kicking around on my to stitch list for longer than I care to recall. City scenes I guess are one of the "in" things when it comes to popular stitching of late - you might even remember my London stitching. But one one seems to have come up with a Detroit one (surprise surprise). But hey I like a challenge and designing one myself, well it became a lot more personal and in honesty, I probably enjoyed stitching it all the more. 

With Detroit having an international riverfront, it has a natural edge for it's city limit and place to start the stitching from. Sadly the only way to actually see this scene in real life, is to view it from across the Detroit River while standing on Canadian soil in our southern neighbours of Windsor. Luckily there is always google to doodle from. Lots and lots of doodling.

The Ren Cen stands proudly in the middle, bordered on one side by it's smaller buildings and carparks (we have a lot of those in Detroit) and to the west, a juxtaposition of the old (Fisher) and new buildings that make up downtown Detroit (Cobo, One Woodward etc).

And compared to the real thing, it doesn't look half bad ...

Downtown Detroit (source)

Made up of varying numbers of black thread, the design is a simple composition of back stitching and the odd grouping of cross stitches for shadows and depth. Jazzing up an old frame I grabbed for cheap at an estate sale and the picture hangs proudly on my living room wall.

There's a couple of reasons why I really enjoyed stitching this piece - working on something of my own from scratch certainly makes yourself proud of your work, but getting back into drawing, creating something again takes cross stitching to a whole new level.

LIFE: Small Things

The death of my netbook while upgrading itself to Windows 10 (it decided to do said upgrade just as they released an update that messed up and makes it just constantly start rebooting) perhaps casts a shadow of this weeks small things, it's certainly put blogging on the back burner a little. But hey, it's letting me crack on with the gardening and crafting. 

But on the up side;

• Checking out more tasty eating places down in Hamtramck - this time Aladdin Sweets & Cafe - the cities first Bangladesh restaurant. 
• Dutch Girl Donuts - enough said.
• Picking the last of the cilantro seeds, one of my kitchen is full to bust with row after row of paper bags of seeds drying out.
• Planting out the first of the fall crops - lots of little broccoli seedlings.
• Getting a new (to me bike) and feeling like a big kid biking around the block.
• Designing and stitching two of my own cross stitch pieces - a Detroit cityscape (more on this to come) and a gift for some friends buying their first house. Really loving designing my own charts, it's taking cross stitching to a fun new level for me.
• Speaking of crafting, for the first time in months, picking up a crochet hook and starting a Christmas tree skirt. Fingers crossed it'll be completed in time for Christmas 2015, it's not stitching up quickly.
• After a whole lotta waiting, lack of communication and even more waiting, our hand selected by Anthrax bottle of Knob Creek finally turned up. Mighty tasty too. 

How's things with you?

CREATIVE: Stitch The States

If you remember my blackwork state designs (Michigan and Pennsylvania), you'll already know I enjoy marking the American states I get around to visiting. And perhaps how slow I am at stitching them. I've seen various ideas around of cross stitching or embroidering countries, states, cities you visited and with a spare couple of hours free the other afternoon, I thought it was high time I got around to playing around with the idea. 

It's a funny little design because in reality, it may never be completed - completed being visiting all the US states and I'm actually okay with that. Because it's marking where I have been and it'll always be in progress.



Because I wanted the design to be hangable even though it's not "complete" it had to be visually appealing from the off, so the design started with back stitching in some fancy pink the outline of all the states. The internet is filled with maps so make the use of them, I used this map of the US that was actually all blocked into squares which made converting it into cross stitching really easy, but if you can always print out on squared paper. Then the rest is made up of stitching your visited states in whatever colour takes your fancy. 

As you can tell my visited states are rather Mid Western - Michigan (obvs), Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, West Virginia and Pennsylvania. I know holiday road tripers probably cram more states in during a week than my seven in nearly four years, but hey bills and life. As for visiting and adding more, I'm not too sure when that'll happen, probably not until we save and undertake our dreamed Washington DC road trip and I'm sure a couple more states will get cross stitched in.

Do you do anything to mark the places you've visited?

CREATIVE: A Garden Party Stitch Along #6 & #7

Our late June roadtrip through me off course with sharing the updates on the old Cross Stitch Collection Garden Party Stitch Along. With feeling like I'm running out of things to say other than hey look more stitches, oh look I'm still avoided stitching the faces ... hate stitching faces, so here's June and July's update all in one post. 

I thought we'd take a step back and see how it was looking in May;

So June rolled around which involved a lot more stitching outside and soaking up that all important natural light. Apparently I got a lot of stitching done in June. Marvellous.



June also started becoming the month that I started avoiding stitching faces. It's not that I can't do them, I just have a strong dislike for stitching one stitch of one shade, then two of another because I find it a little wasteful. My biggest issue is with back stitching faces. Like I mentioned with trout pout in my last update. Yeah she still doesn't have her lips back ... or her eyes for that matter ... no cross stitching for her.



But as June rolled to an end with me being ill and our road trip so the stitching was actually set aside for a couple of weeks. I actually picked up working on a Dinobot Transformers piece for Joe and now being distracted by that old sampler project.



Knowing I had a stitch along check in a couple of weeks ago got my arse back into gear and I've been working on all the background pieces. So much that the last two figures on the left side are looking rather ghostly.



My goal for August is to finish off this last page on the left side and perhaps complete/catch up with the backstitching.

May through to July

Oh yeah and tackle those faces ... urgh.

Come share what you've been crafting lately!

CREATIVE: There's a Cat In the Garden Shed

There's never really much rhyme or reason for which cross stitch projects I get around to doing. Sometimes there's a need for a certain thing in a certain room, or it's a fitting idea for a birthday card. Or because there's a cat in it, it's brightly coloured and involves a garden. #Winning!

This is one of three garden shed designs from Shannon Wasilieff (who has a fabulous etsy store btw) that appeared in the #228 issue of the World of Cross Stitching earlier this year. It ended up being one of those quick small projects that you don't want to end because it's such a cheerful thing to be working on.

Source

The other two designs are just has wonder in their style and colour. I really doubt my sewing skills so I didn't even try and attempt to turn them into the suggested shed design. But I think it looks more than okay in it's little frame.

Granted I'm yet to buy myself a wonderfully bright bench or have a flower box, but there's more often then not one of my fur balls sitting on their kitty tower watching me through the window if I'm out working in the garden. Well it's more likely the birds, but ya know ...

Small projects like this are handy for being able to pick up and set aside. They eat away into my stash of spare cottons and with stitching that huge stitch along, it breaks up the concentration. Hopefully I'll get around to stitching the other two after I get through some of my other cross stitchy plans. I'm also on the hunt for another huge project because i'm getting through stitching projects rather fast these days ... oops.

CREATIVE: A Garden Party Stitch Along #5

You know what I love? Warm sunny afternoons that I can spend outside cross stitching away to the sounds of the birds tweeting to each other. Nothing beats crafting in natural daylight that's for sure. Although sitting under our Maple tree there always seems to be the risk of either leaves, seeds or bird poop landing on your head, shoulder or sewing. Ah well all in a day's work. 

Another month as rolled by so here's my latest marker for the Cross Stitch Collection Garden Party stitch along. This last month I've been working my way around some more of the figures - a grand old lass, some gossiping busybodies in the background and some children who I've decided are twins. You see the more time I spend with these figures, I've started making up personal histories and back stories for them all. 

I have to admit that the female servant is one of my favorites. Possibly because my own family history contains many a 1800's census reference to female domestic servants so I feel a kinship with her.

April to May 

If there's one thing I'm really learning sharing all these updates, alongside all my other cross stitchy happenings. Getting the camera to really capture the true colour of these designs and threads is a right royal pain in the a!s. But carry on I must - my stitching plans for June include working on the old background a little more - it's kinda boring but it stitches up quickly.

So I love stitching outside, but tell me what you love doing while you're soaking up the sun!

CREATIVE: Grand Traverse Light

The Grand Traverse Light in itself is well worth the drive from Traverse City, not to mention the beautiful scenery of cherry fields and the Leelanlau State Park. In fact it was this very lighthouse that began my love for these buildings that you'll find all around the Great Lakes. 

          

Luckily my love for Michigan lighthouses has always been forfilled with the cross stitch kits from Presque Isle Needleworks just so I have an excuse to mark my visits not only in photographs but in the craft I love the most. You might remember I've already stitched 40 Mile Point and Mackinac Point lighthouse - another two lighthouses we visited on our autumnal drive around the Lower Peninsular back in October 2013. After moving I knew hidden away in one of my cross stitch boxes was the kit for Grand Traverse lighthouse and it was high time I got around to stitching it. 

While it's stitched with a limited colour palette, I love their designs for how bold and eye catching they are. It's simple but they really do reflect the likeness of the lighthouse. Luckily enough they are just the right size for fitting within a 6" embroidery hoop to add to that old hoop wall of mine. 

You can always remind yourself with my original post the Grand Traverse Light here. I'm going to have to get around to eyeing up some more lighthouses just for the mere excuse of then being able to stitch them.