silver bells

No, it`s not about Christmas - I just had to wait until now to show you this card I made over two weeks ago for my parents` 25th wedding anniversary. Finally, this Tuesday the big day arrived - and, surprisingly, so did the card which, for a change, didn`t get lost in the post - so I can share this photo with you:

Oh, and just so that you can`t say I never give away any trade secrets: for the silver frame around the fabric I used a piece of the silvery card lid that comes with these foil pie dishes... well, do I have my moments or what?! And the reason for picking a bells-motif is that for this special anniversary my parents decided to renew their vows - hence the wedding bells... And all this just a fortnight after Valentine`s Day... there`s so much romance in the air: should I watch Pride and Prejudice tonight?

new project in-between birds

I`ve created a new Facebook page, called (surprisingly...) Cross Stitch A to Z. For the past few days I`ve been so busy making new friends over there that I quite neglected my wee blog - I realise this ashamedly (is that a word?) now. Besides, I didn`t have the usual amount of time to sit in front of the computer anyway, thanks to the mid-term break and a boisterous 6-year-old running all over the place but we survived (albeit barely) and now I`m here again. So here`s the story of the past week in photos:

I got this far with my birds when I was forced to stop: partly because after the dark blue I also ran out of the dark green, so I couldnt`t finish the knotwork anyway... and when I thought that nevermind, I`d just get on with the hundreds of yards` worth of backstitch, I fell in love with this...

How beautiful is this picture? It is called Shire Horses, originally by Coats Crafts UK, but I found the pattern in the World of Cross Stitching issue 114.

I started it on Friday night and this is where I am just now:

14 February - Happy Valentine`s Day!

If I`m honest, I`m starting to panic a bit: after the dark blue, I`m about to run out of SEVERAL colours. When the sky`s a bit cloudy, I`m thinking, "Not fair!" (not the sky but life in general, you understand...). When the sun comes out, I`m thinking, "Good! At least it`ll make my trip worthwhile and I don`t have to go to Kirkcaldy for just ONE skein!". And whatever the weather, I`m stitching like crazy, like the proverbial old dear who`s knitting faster and faster to finish the jumper before her wool runs out... Not that you can see much of a result of all that "fast" work... can you?

11 February update

Just a quick photo attachment this time - sorry, sore head, sore tooth... and we didn`t win the lottery AGAIN so I think I`ll go to bed. At least my birds` knotwork frame is growing (although if I wanted to continue in the negative vein, I could say that my dark blue, typically, ran out just before I could complete the circle - the eagle-eyed among you might notice that there`s cca. 10 cm missing at the bottom... and, I`m afraid, it`s going to be missing until the next time I`m in Kirkcaldy to get one (=1) skein of DMC 791). Anyway, I can hear my bed calling, so here`s this weekend`s photo:

7 February update

Good news: the cold is almost over, I`m on my last few tissues. Bad news: my wisdom tooth, the fourth one that still hasn`t grown out completely, decided to give it another go last night, so I hardly slept a wink, now my whole jaw is throbbing. But even this has a silver line in it: since I can barely swallow, losing some weight should be as easy as... pie... yumm...!
Last time I hinted that I have a knitting project as well. So here are the details: a few weeks ago I found this knitted sausage-snail cushion on Etsy, in a shop called WaveSong (how beautiful is that?) and I`ve been itching to try to make one myself ever since.

I only have a rough idea how it might have been made so, absolutely playing it by ear, I started to knit a roughly 18-20 cm wide scarf - I`m thinking, by the time I roll it up sideways, it should give me a thick-enough sausage for cushion purposes. I still need to figure out how long it`ll need to be (Hubby reckons at least 3 metres), because the diameter of the cushion should be at least 35 cms to be ideal for average chair- and bum-widths.
So far, this is what I`ve got:

I know, I have a long way to go yet... but it feels good to knit again, it exercises other muscles in my hand for a change. Well, not SUCH a big change, you see, because I`m never too far away from my cross stitch. This is the state of my birds after the weekend:

As the picture grows, it`s increasingly more time-consuming to get round a whole circle so I`m expecting my progress will slow down too - hopefully, though, I`ll be able to finish my January project before the end of February!

1 February update

Well, it looks like I haven`t been able to finish my birdies in January... nevermind, it can be my February challenge! And to my defence, may I add that I`m full of something - yeah, I know what you`re thinking, probably THAT as well but no, I meant the cold or, scarily possibly, the flu... plus, on top of all that, whenever I`m not feeling too weak to hold the needles, I started a knitting project as well (more of that later).
Anyway, last night my nose finally stopped dripping like a dodgy tap for long enough so that I could do some stitching and here`s the result:

I`m not sure the difference is instantly obvious so I`d better explain: I finished the knotwork under the two birds and started adding the backstitch at the bottom, e.g. the feet of the blue-headed bird are now visible (I hope! If not, I`m sorry for the photo`s quality!). I`m also beginning to realise that the backstitch will take me absolutely ages - something I should`ve known from the fact that the magazine suggested getting 3 skeins (!) of the backstitch colour, which means I`m going to need roughly 144 metres (!!!) to finish it. Lovely...

26 January update

Not feeling on top of the world due to some sort of cold (that, interestingly, induced only 3 or 4 noseblows all day but I still feel so washed-out), so anyway, due to this "feeling poorly", I hardly stitched today. It is now 6 o`clock, I`m sitting here waiting for Hubby to arrive with my medicine (= pizza), and this is the state of my birds:

update on Celtic birds

Just a quick photo update after the one I put up here yesterday (24 January) morning; I was working on my birds all day yesterday and today... It`s 5 p.m. now and my eyes are bleeding so I guess it`s time to stop. This is how things stand just now:

next Celtic challenge

Here`s what I`ve been working on since last Friday... well, actually, the weekend doesn`t really count since Hubby`s got manflu, i.e. looking after him (=mostly putting up with his mood) and entertaining the 6-year-old... I mean THE OTHER 6-year-old in the house was solely my responsibility for those blessed 48 hours... So anyway, this is how far I got with my next Celtic challenge (next, as in "after the Celtic chessboard" and challenge, because I want to finish it in January - hahaha!):

And just in case you can`t figure it out what it is yet, here`s a photo from the magazine (Mary Hickmott`s New Stitches, issue 194) of this lovely Celtic cushion:

I think it`ll look stunning, I can`t wait to see the finished cushion!!!

Shades of Africa

I just finished Joan Elliott`s design from issue 152 of Cross Stitcher (October 2004) which I started last Tuesday - yes, a mere 9 days ago. Not bad going, methinks. On the other hand, I guess it`ll take me a lot longer to find a powder-blue picture frame to fit it in... but who knows? Maybe this will be my lucky year (although judging by the start of it...!). Oh, and not to mention that this is supposed to be the last year on Earth... should I even bother framing this lovely African lady? I think I will!

plums

You may remember that a few weeks ago I finished the apple-kit I got from Janet in our local stitching club (you can see the picture and read about it here: Cross Stitch A to Z: I`m back!).
Since then I managed to do two things: 1. I also finished the plum-kit, which my Mum took back to Hungary to give it to my Gran for her nameday (in case you didn`t know, the 21st of January is Agnes... among other things and names and all...). And 2. I also managed to have a look at the cover of said kits - yes, indeed they are from America, made by a company called `Cross My Heart`, although whether they still make them, I do not know (these two kits were made in 1993).
So, in the hope of my Gran NOT seeing this before the 21st, here`s the picture of this `Favourite Fruit Kit` completed:

post-Christmas post

Now that the holiday`s over ("aaaw"/"yeay!", depending on my mood), I can finally share some more photos with you that until now were in the hidden vaults of my camera on account of being somebody`s Xmas prezzie. That is, I HOPE I can share them (still not happy with the way Blogger`s working for me at the moment, although I`m beginning to suspect the problem is with MY laptop).
Anyway, here`s a cushion I made for my friend Jo and her family - more exactly, I bought the cushion in ASDA, I only sewed my wee cross stitch on it (when I say wee, I mean not the size but how much actual work was involved which came to next to nothing. Note the big blocks of colours that make up the two dancers - a piece of cake, indeed. If you`d like to have a go at this design yourself, you can find it in Cross Stitcher Issue 211).

Another Christmas present was this blackwork picture of a street in Hythe from Mary Hickmott`s New Stitches magazine (Issue 183), which I absolutely adored and made for my parents - who, incidentally, brought a picture for us from my uncle this year, and since my Mum wrapped all their presents here to save the wrapping paper from getting torn in the suitcase, we exchanged almost identically wrapped pictureframes at Christmas. (For the notoriously curious among you, ours is a holographic/3D-kinda sailing ship, which Gregory absolutely adores. And here`s the one we gave to them:

Finally, here`s another present that Tam and I got but it`s also home-made. Long story short, this year I asked for flannel duvet covers but because of the different pillow sizes in Hungary, my Mum didn`t want to buy whole sets and then throw half of them away, so she bought the material instead and - knowing that I`d been longing for a decent sewing machine for a while - she bought one for me as soon as she got here. So here are the Xmas prezzie duvet covers that I made for ourselves with my brand new Argos sewing machine:

I`m back!

Naturally, I`m aware that I owe some kind of explanation, if not apology, for this long disappearance and I`ve got one: I`ve just been through the second of my twice-a-year bouts of reading-frenzy. So I spent the past 4-5 weeks methodically working my way through some 15-16 books and I only stopped when I reached the end of one particular bookshelf. Probably you have deducted by now that I don`t really do anything by half - DVD box sets, for example, must have been invented with me in mind; I simply can`t watch 40 minutes of something and then wait a week for the continuation of the story: I`d much rather sit in front of the telly for 48 hours non-stop and watch a year`s worth of episodes of a series.
Anyway, now that I`m back (to a massive relief of Husband and Son), I find I resurfaced just in time to sort out some Christmas prezzies. Naturally, kids came first:

I made a dozen Rudolph heads about two months ago, thinking that there are only 10 kids in Gregory`s class but then the actual number turned out to be 14.

After a wee bit of panicking, I started to make some snowmen, and when I got sick of that design, I made some Christmas puddings (since by this time Hubby, having seen the ones I`d finished, also ordered some for "himself").

All in all, by the end of last week I had enough to make these gift tags...
... which I attached to the (shop-bought, again this year, I`m ashamed to say...) festive lollies:

I also made an ornament which was supposed to be a scented sachet at the same time but I`m afraid even I, the person who put the blasted cinnamon sticks in it, cannot smell a thing so I had to resign to calling it just a simple ornament.

Unfortunately, I can`t share the pictures of one of my latest achievements with you just yet since it`s somebody`s Christmas prezzie, so for the now all I can say is that it was one of those moments when you see a pattern and you instantly know that it`d be perfect for somebody so I hope this person will like it too. On the other hand, while on the subject of prezzies, a couple of weeks ago I got some kits from Janet, a very lovely lady from our local stitching club, who always reminds me of my great-granny. She bought down these 3, probably American kits, saying that she`s not into cross stitch and she`d thought I might like them. And I did, of course. So much so that I started on the first one straight away and I finished it yesterday - which pleased me a lot since tomorrow night I can take it to the club and present Janet with it; I thought it`d be a nice way of repaying her for her kindness... I just hope she`ll like it and it won`t be a case of "Oh, great! Just when I finally got rid of them...!"

Last but not least I finally finished some of my pencil case projects so now all I have to do is add them to my Etsy shop - something I`m beginnig to dread because let me tell you, the past hour was a nightmare with this new Blogger layout: I can`t see the photos I`m attaching, only 4-line techno-blahblah, and I can only check things in the Preview but there, of course, you can`t change a blooming thing... AAAAARGGGGH!
I think this much technology was enough for one day... if you don`t hear from me for yet another 4 or 5 weeks, it`s because I`m still trying to recover from this! Oh, in which case:
MERRY CHRISTMAS AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR!

my starters for Etsy - and a pig...

I have spent the past week or so working on the lovely pieces of red and green 11HPI aida fabric that my Mum had bought for me. After a few trials and errors, like these:

I managed to find a snowflake pattern that only uses white thread (which looks much better than gold on this material) and is just the right size so that by the time I sew up an ornament, it`s neither too small nor too big for a tree decoration.

And if you`re curious what`s been happening elsewhere, in that parallel universe where holidays like Halloween or Christmas don`t count...? Well, I stitched a little pig!

autumn break

It`s been such a long time I last wrote here, I almost forgot how to do this (not that I was such an expert before...)! The reason for my silence is that my Mum was here for Gregory`s school break and we were busy doing all kinds of stuff - nothing spectacular, mostly just spending time together, enjoying one another`s company, although I have to tell you this: as of from 2 days ago, we too belong to that exclusive group of people that can claim to have seen the inside of the St Monans Windmill!!! Those of you who are reading this abroad, i.e. not in Scotland, I wouldn`t recommend to hike all the way here just for this tourist attraction, but those of you who are in the area: come and have a look, it`s well worth it for the view and the wee history lesson (if you always wanted to find out about 18th-19th century salt production, this is the place for you!).

I thought that with all the extra programs, I`d hardly have time to do anything crafty - how wrong could I be? Not only did I finish a batch of my Christmas decorations...

Because of their shape, Hubby calls these my "rugby decorations". I made them using the smallest pieces of the scrap materials I`d bought a few weeks ago; I glued the fabric to some card, then cut out some oval shapes, perforated them along the edges, and finally, I sewed them together, 3 at a time, with embroidery floss. Unfortunately, although I took about 400 pictures, I still can`t show you the 3rd side of my rugby ball...

... I also made a prototype of a foam decoration I always wanted to try:

I`m still not sure about this... There`s quite a lot of work involved, and at the end of the day, you`ve got a foamy Xmas tree to show for it. But then again, just like my "rugby balls", this too is a non-breakable ornament, which is already a plus in our house (of course, you don`t know my son but if you have a bauble-chasing cat at home, you know what I`m talking about).

There was some cross stitching done over the past two weeks as well, naturally, but I can`t show these to you just yet because my Mum took them back with her to Hungary as presents and I don`t want to spoil anybody`s surprise. However, talking about surprises! After all these years it turned out that my Mum can embroider! To me it was such a shock as it`d be for you to find out, say, that your goldfish can play Chopin. (If your goldfish can play Chopin, try to think of a similarly shocking example instead). Anyway, as I recently found out, she`s learnt the basics as a little girl, she just always hated all kinds of fiddly jobs, hence she never took embroidery/knitting/crochet/cross stitch/etc. on as a hobby (which, by the way, makes her the odd-one-out in our family, where her gran, her mum (my gran), her sister, her niece, and now her daughter as well all do some kind of needlework). But I`m immensely proud to say that now she has joined the club too - of course, what wouldn`t she do for her grandson?

My Mum made this pumpkin Trick-or-Treat bag for Gregory, using satin stitch for the eyes/nose/mouth and blanket stitch to sew up the sides

She decorated the back of the bag with some chain-stitched lines, then finally added the patch I`d stitched (my only contribution, a cross-stitched letter "G" with complementary spider and cobwebs).

I know it`d probably never win first prize in a trick-or-treat-bag competition but Gregory loves it, especially the fact that nobody else in the world has a bag like this. Yesterday I saw the plastic equivalent in ASDA for 15 pence; sure, it would`ve been a lot faster and cheaper to buy one of those, but where`s the fun in that? Or the value? Why would you keep it after Halloween when you know that next year you can get something like this again for 15p? On the other hand, this lopsided wee bag with all its endearing mistakes will be an heirloom forever in our family - not only is it handmade but it was made by someone who`d rather climb Mount Everest than to pick up a sewing needle, yet she still stitched it for her grandson... Aren`t grannies amazing? If I can teach my son just this one thing, to appreciate that, I think I`ll have achieved something...

wee detour into knitting and bear-madness...

I know this blog is supposed to be about my cross stitch but with the wintry weather fast approaching, my son started to panic that his teddies are not so well-equipped for the coldest months. So last night I had to dig out my knitting needles and some wool to make a hat and scarf for Daddy Bigyi, Gregory`s 2nd favourite bear. Considering I haven`t knitted anything for about 2 years now, I have to say I surprised myself!

And just to prove that the weird madness that urges one to knit for a teddy bear runs deep in my family, here`s the ensemble my Gran made for Bigyi this summer:

The main thing is that now both Bigyis are kitted out for the winter, so I can get back to my stitching; at the moment I`m working on some Rudolph heads (there`s something so cheerful about his red nose, I just love it!) but, again, I have several orders from Gregory for some Halloween stuff, so as usual, I`m busy, busy, BUSY - and all this in the school break!!!

By the way, just a quick note regarding these two bears: Gregory got the "smaller" one when he was about 4 months old, and the other one, "Daddy Bigyi" about a year later, as a replacement toy in case the "real" Bigyi ever got lost. The reason why poor Bigyi is only half the size of the other one is that she (or he, it`s still undecided) has been washed considerably more often than Daddy Bigyi who, as a consequence, retained his original chubbiness, whereas Bigyi is no more now than an empty-bellied sack. But all this is of no consequence, she`s a bona fide member of our family, Gregory wouldn`t go anywhere without her (hence the warm winter clothes too). Also, we have a shortcut on our Desktop to http://www.flickr.com/groups/592963@N24/pool/with/2172199111/ , dedicated to all the photos that IKEA`s Blund Bear enthusiasts around the world posted - Gregory would easily sit in front of the computer for an hour, looking at these pictures, laughing his head off every time "another Bigyi" appears on the beach or on top of a skycraper (bless!). And if I`m honest, it`s kind of a relief to me as well that there are other idiots out there just like me...!

Here`s a wee selection of our pics (again, nothing to do with cross stitch but they`re such fun!!!):

Bigyi as Secret Santa

Enjoying a bit of football...

...but equally captivated by a good book.

The local bobby, working hard...

... so that he can spend the weekend with some well-earned relaxation, only working on his tan.

And, of course, we have other bears as well, and sometimes they need to be washed too!

 

Gregory`s Christmas gifts

No, it`s not about what the Wee Man will get from Santa - as far as that`s concerned, even though I`m pretty sure he wouldn`t read my blog (Gregory, not Santa!), I still wouldn`t leave such tell-tale traces since we still "believe" in these traditional things... By the way, the wobbly tooth fell out yesterday morning and it`s been lying on Gregory`s table for the past two days; I had to promise not to go near it, lest I`d feel tempted to pass it on to the Tooth Fairy. As far as Santa`s concerned, Gregory almost considers him as a family member: they`re in a more or less daily correspondence since whenever he sees a toy he likes in a shop or in the telly, he draws a picture of it on his Santa-list (a system I can only encourage!). He`s been writing this mile-long list since last Christmas, I`ve had to collect an album`s worth of letters so far, which I`m to post nearer the time, thus securing all the toys we simply cannot live without ("But really, Mummy, honest...!").

At the same time, he`s aware that Christmas is a time when we, people give presents to one another, showing our love and appreciation - actually, being a non-religious family, this is, in fact, what we celebrate at Yuletide: the joy of being with our loved ones and the happiness we can give them with our little presents is more or less an added bonus. In this spirit, every year I try to make a little something for Gregory`s wee classmates too, so he can spread the joy and excitement we all feel around this time of the year.
When he first started nursery, I was really on top of my game: not only did I stitch personalised Christmas tags for each and every child in his group...

...but also decided to surprise them with some home-made Scottish tablet, which I spent ages wrapping individually in all the colourful cellophane I`d saved from a 1kg box of Quality Street (which I`d all had to eat beforehand, self-sacrificing as I am...).

Last year, however, when Gregory was in Primary 1, I was a wee bit lazier, I have to admit: this time I didn`t make my own sweetie but used candy canes I`d bought in a shop instead.

However, let me just say in my defence that last year, in Gregory`s old school there were 24 kids in his class so that meant quite a lot of stitching... and quite a lot of card-signing for the Wee Man who`d learnt to write just weeks earlier! I`m just that wee bit relieved (for both of us!) that this year he only has 10 classmates...