CROSS STITCHING: VW Bugs and Vintage Record Players

Me and Joe play the punch buggy game* all the time - be it during a quick drive to the post office or a road trip somewhere. It's always fun and I nearly always loose, it's just one of our little couple quirks. In my stitching mission to sew things that are personal to me/us it was Joe's suggestion to stitch something related to a VW Bug, I mean they are pretty cool right?

The design is adapted from a cross stitching book by Jeanette Crews Designs titled 40 Classic Cars - One Nighters which had a delightfully cute 1960's VW Bug - a design I just repeated lots and lots. Keeping things simple, each car is stitched in just one colour (colours reflecting the actual ones we see here and there in the old Metro Detroit area) and finished off with a simple black backstitching design. Popping it into a 6" wooden hoop its yet another addition to that wall of mine.



Going along with stitching more personalized self created designs I thought it was high time I tried stitching something vinyl record related, what better than trying to recreate our vintage 1970's Sony player - a player we picked up at an estate sale for a mind blowing $3 (yes really). It certainly wasn't the easily task, what with trying to stitch a circle so it actually looks like a record was on the tricky side but I like how it's turned out.



Granted I jazzed up the colour from it's vintage brown into a more dashing blue, but most of the dials and so on are pretty much in their correct positions. The back stitching was pretty much free hand, a tale of learning and stitching as I went along. Just excuse all the mess in the background of that image - that's the packing pile for moving.

I've even managed to bulk stitching some simple markers in blackstitch lettering for the back of my pieces because I totally suck at remembering to do so and it's nice to be able to that somewhere a reminder of just when something was stitched (I mean aside from my blogs and stuff).

This is probably an excellent time to tell you about that other blog Hook Stitch Hoop that I've been working on, one more dedicated to my cross stitching, works in progress and the like. So if that's you're thing too, make sure to follow along!

What have you been crafting lately?

* Punch buggy game is one children often play and, on spotting a VW Bug one gets to punch the upper arm of their team mate, shouting either "Slug Bug"/"Punch Buggy" or shouting out the colour of said car.