Double Dog and Fizzy Moon

I almost forgot to post about Double Dog! 😲😱😂

This cute little pup, designed by Makiko, is the free gift with the latest issue of Cross Stitch Crazy (250). As far as I know, he has no name - only I call him Double Dog, because I got to stitch him twice, once in May and once in July. Yep, some of the Christmas stuff gets prepared that much in advance (so no wonder the odd pup goes walkies occasionally). 😉 But the main thing is that he and his little robin friend reappeared for showtime:

And still on the subject of Christmas cards: last weekend I did some private stitching (IKR? 😱) and finished this Fizzy Moon for my mom-in-law. Hubby chose it from my stash (clearly, a man who has no idea of what backstitch is), but it got done and after my freshly ordered super-sticky double sided tapes arrived, I even made up the card so am well pleased with my effort - hope she`ll like it too! 😊

mini-makes

I have been busy stitching large stuff lately, from Indian elephants to the Mother of All Christmas Stockings, but in between these big projects I`ve managed to finish a few smaller designs too, so I thought I`d gather them up and make one decent sized blog post out of them all.

First up, a recent issue of Crazy had this butterfly shaped frame with it as a freebie and I wanted to stitch it as soon as I saw it. My mom was here for a fortnight while the wee man was off school for the Spring/Easter break and I knew she`d go back home in time to celebrate my gran`s birthday so I had the perfect excuse too: I stitched it for her 84th.

While I was working on this, I remembered that there was another white wooden frame freebie in an earlier issue of Crazy, so I dug through my freebie bag and found it, a heart shaped one - I stitched this one for my mom, as a belated birthday present because we couldn`t be together in February.

I`m always pleased when I can give them matching gifts - for Mothers` Day (which is in May in Hungary) I got handbags and chocolate for them - I hope the carefully wrapped parcels survived the journey in mom`s suitcase because they can`t open them till 7 May. 😊
For Mothers` Day here in the UK at the end of March, I stitched another freebie kit for my MIL,  a card from the Diary of an Edwardian Lady series. It was a bit FK-heavy but even that didn`t matter, I was so elated to be able to start AND finish a project on the same day. 😂

And then sometime around March, there was another freebie kit that came out in WOCS, a Fizzy Moon card that I`d stitched... or, to be precise (and to sound like Thomson and Thompson), HALF a Fizzy...? 😕

Of course, it made much more sense when I saw it made up as a card: he`s peeking from behind a door! 😀

Apropos teddies: the other week I saw a random advertisement on my page from DMC and it looks like their new printed cross stitch kit range is up and running. I stitched this Tatty Teddy from their Me To You series and I have to say, this has been the most joyful way EVER to stitch a Tatty Teddy because for the first time, I didn`t have to bother with the BS-heavy fur as I only had to sew the present with the ribbon and those few flowers. 😁

I`m not a great fan of printed cross stitch per se, I think it`s very hard to be exact during the printing process and my OCD flares up when I see out-of-line... lines, I guess, but I have to admit that this is the quickest and easiest way to have a framed Tatty Teddy picture on your wall while feeling that sense of achievement that you get from a finished piece that you have stitched yourself. 😉
Have a lovely Easter weekend, people, and happy stitching!

Fizzy Moon - The World of Cross Stitching 237

Another publication hits the UK shops today, WOCS 237, and in it (on it?) is what the magazine`s lovely editor, Ruth Southorn labelled `our showstopper cover project`: Fizzy Moon. :)

Although generally I`m not a big fan of cute cross stitch, I love stitching Fizzy and have made several pics and Christmas cards featuring him - for some reason, I love his small-yet-sweet eyes and stocky-but-soft body. Not to mention that most of the time he`s bearing gifts or brings a flower, which makes him an ideal present, and from a technical point of view, he is `backstitchy`, yes, but not the worst.

This particular one for WOCS is a 100x80 picture that took 25 hours to finish - as I remember, in the build-up to our summer holiday, so I was packing flipflops and shorts in suitcases between stitchy sessions... hard to believe it was half a year ago! :O

Probably it`s due to this pre-holiday frenzy that I didn`t take any progress pics, only one at the end, but at least I have different copies of it to show you: first my own photo, then Fizzy as cover star and, finally, as he appears in the magazine (I love the white frame they chose for him). Oh, and last night I accidentally came across the new Sayings-range on the DMC Creative World website, so I`ll post a pic of my first-ever tapestry too - a wee detour into a different kind of needlework with this saying often attributed to Oscar Wilde but in fact it`s from Voltaire. ;) Thank you for stopping by, happy stitching!