Heathwitch’s Stitchcraft

[wip] Wear a Smile #2

Lizzie*Kate’s “Wear a Smile” has taken me two and a half hours so far. I think it’s really showing the varigated thread (DMC’s Colour Variations 4240) to great effect.

I am under the weather today, so am taking a day in bed with some fruit, plenty of water, and my cross stitch. Who knows how many stitches may get done inbetween boughts of sleep? :-)

[finish] Live, Laugh, Love & [wip] Wear a Smile #1

My first finish of 2009 is one of Lizzie*Kate‘s Snippet designs, which I love. :-) I did some thread substitution on this — opting to use some plain DMC colours for the text and some of their Colour Variations for the decorations. I think it has worked out rather nicely — what say you?

This piece, “Live, Laugh, Love”, took seven hours to stitch (on 28ct evenweave) and will most likely end up as one of a series of thank you presents that I’m hoping to gift some people with this summer. I enjoyed stitching it that much that, once done, I immediately picked up another Snippet chart and made a start on that one last night, again on 28ct evenweave:

This will be “Wear a Smile”, and I’m doing something similar here — the main text is in Colour Variations, with the remaining text in plain colours. So far I’m about 1hr 40mins into this one, so it’s coming along nicely. I just wish I spend more time stitching at the moment as I’m really in the mood for it! LOL …

More updates coming soon! :-)

[finish] Butterfly & [finish] Pram

Whoo, I’ve not posted here for a while and that’s mainly because life happened. But I did finish two cross stitch pieces in October, and both of which were gratefully received by friends. I made them both into cards and enjoyed stitching them — and today I realised I’d not posted them here! So here we go… :-)

The amazing thing about this one was that I intuited what to stitch for this particular recipient, a tutor on a course I took in 2008. As it happens, her office is painted in lilacs and she has a lot of butterfly artwork in there! I made this piece into a card for her (as shown) and it was signed by everyone on my course for her. I am so glad that she liked it.

The other piece I stitched was for my wedding stylist, who is expecting a baby. As I don’t know if the babe will be a boy or a girl, I went for this lovely little chart I found as it’s so brightly coloured it can be neutral. I used seed beads instead of French knots to make things easier and give it a bit of texture. Again, it was made into a card.

I’ve not had time to cross stitch anything since. I do have some WIPs and also a couple of knitting items on the needles, but for the moment nothing new to show. Here’s hoping I can spend more time in 2009 doing crafts! :-)

[finish] Scorpio

I recently finished a cross-stitched Scorpio for a friend in the States. She’s since received it, so I thought I’d post the detail here. :-)

This is from a chart of a cute twist on the zodiac, namely Scorpio. I loved stitching this guy — only about 10 hours on 14ct aida. I later frayed the edges and mounted him onto a card:

And remember Hello Kitty? I made her into a sweet card for a different friend’s birthday. I recently found a back of blank, pearlescent cards in a variety of pastel shades, and whilst I don’t usually do pastel colours these cards make beautiful companions to some of my cross stitch finishes!

SBQ: Thread Clippings

I’m an avid reader of Stitching Blogger’s Questions, but I think this is the first time I’ve answered one. This week, the question is:

What do you do to your thread clippings? Do you just scrap them or do you use them in something else?

Well, for me it depends on the length of the clipping. If it’s shorter than is usable — i.e. I can get less than three stitches out of it — then I bin it. If it’s longer than that, I wind it around the original thread so that I know what colour it is (i.e. a short piece of DMC 666 ["Christmas Red", to you non-stitchers out there] will get wrapped around the remainder of the thread skein) and store it until I come to use it. I tend to do this with every colour possible, except DMC 310 (black), which I always keep no matter the length — black is always, always useful. :-)