Tag Archives: Snippets

Kits, cards, and a missing colour

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It’s an excellent thing to get children interested in crafts for all sorts of reasons besides giving them an enjoyable hobby for the rest of their lives, so I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone by producing some children’s kits and offer them for sale at our church’s mother & toddler group to raise money for the building fund. Having considered and rejected the mini peacock as not really being a children’s design, I remembered a kit I put together some years ago for some young friends of ours whom we were “babysitting”. It needed a serious rummage to unearth it, but I managed to dig up my Hot Air Balloon chart! Here is its first stitcher proudly displaying her work; a sneak peek at the chart; and the blue aida and perle cotton I’ve picked to make the kits with (I think the first one was done with coton a broder).

A young stitcher shows off her work The hot air balloon chart Materials for the kit

Talking of the building fund, the Art & Craft Fair went well, a good number of people came in and viewed, browsed and bought, although as usual the cake stall proved to be the most popular smiley. Lots of people took flyers for the workshop, so I’m hoping for a full house and possibly a second workshop! But first I’ll be doing a sponsored cycle ride around the local reservoir this Saturday – and the weather forecast is not good …

My table at the Craft Fair

The new Notebook Kits (just visible on the Craft Fair display above) are finally on the website – with pop-up pictures of all available colours, which is why it took a while for them to appear as I had to stitch the model in a further five colour combinations. As I didn’t want to use up any more of the notebooks, they’re not actually attached. Fortunately they work on cards too! It’s always good to have a further use for a kit, isn’t it?

The notebook patch works on cards too

Having finished the notebook models, and keeping the Floral Lace finishes as in-between and travel projects, I had to decide which of the Planned designs I’d stitch next. I went for Orpheus, a pair of designs based on Ukrainian whitework, although these will be stitched on two shades of Sparklies hand-dyed Lugana rather than on white. I do plan to use threads in the same shade as the fabric, though, and this is where I ran into an unexpected problem: I didn’t have perle #5 in the right shade. Originally I had planned one of the pair to be worked on Zweigart’s Moss Green with DMC perle 503, and the other on Burnt Orange with 722. But 722 is too dark, really, for Sparklies’ lovely muted orange Pumpkin Patch – it needs 402. And for some unfathomable reason I do not have 402 in perle #5! So a visit to Sew & So is called for, with possibly a few extra skeins of White perle thrown in (always useful) in order to make the most of the postage. For now I leave you with my colour dilemma:

Which shade for Orpheus?

A productive cold and a troublesome daffodil

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I have a cold. So, I’m sure, have lots of other people, but that doesn’t make it any less uncomfortable; and it’s most annoying not being able to sing along to carols because it brings on a coughing fit! In short, for the last few days I have been feeling less than usually cheerful. So last Friday, with the accounts more or less up to date and the tax return completed and sent off, I took some time off. What with coughing and bunged up sinuses I wasn’t at all sure I’d be able to get to sleep if I tried, so I decided on a relaxing afternoon of card-making. I riffled through my stack of completed small projects, picked some suitable cards to go with them (remember all those aperture cards?), made myself a mug of tea and set to work.

First some miscellaneous projects, mostly Snippets and Happy Hour with a course project and a few freebies thrown in; for some of them I used single fold cards I had in one of my stash drawers.

Miscellaneous finishes

Then eight Round Dozen Variations. I hadn’t realised I’d done so many recently…

8 Round Dozen variations

On Saturday I had another go and elevated eleven Song of the Weather stitched models to a state of usefulness. There were thirteen (I’d stitched March twice), but two of them were done on Afghan fabric so they weren’t suitable to be made into cards. I haven’t yet decided what they’ll be turned into, if anything.

11 Song of the Weather cards

With about ten left of the original blue-and-white Song of the Weather models which had already been “finished”, that should give us a good stock of birthday / anniversary / wedding / baptism / etc. cards for a couple of years!

Because of the general head-stuffed-with-cotton-wool feeling I hadn’t been doing a lot of stitching, but I worked on Floral Lace: Daffodil for a bit yesterday. All was well to begin with (I can now stitch the shared part of Floral Lace practically blindfolded) but when it got to the small cross stitches I did some serious miscounting. Unpicked, worked it again, then realised the flower on my chart looked a bit odd. Ah. It’s only got five petals. Daffodils have six petals. I know the flower motifs in Floral Lace aren’t exactly botanical illustrations, but here it was definitely noticeable. So today I recharted the flower, which unfortunately means having to unpick part of the green stems and leaves I’d already stitched because the flower now overlaps them. Heigh ho, it’s all in a day’s designing, and hopefully Daffodil will look all the better for it.

More fun with foam

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Today I finished Snippets, the last of the three sets of smalls and minis that make up the Stitcher’s Set of 10 decorative little projects. And to pre-empt the usual question from non-stitchers, “what are you going to do with them?”, here are three things that you could do with them, using foam items like the ones I got from Yellow Moon – a notebook, a keyring (unless you laminate it probably for symbolic use only, like ceremonially handing a teenager his own key to the house) and a name plate for a girl’s bedroom door. Another “foam finish”, a flower frame, can be seen in the Gallery.

Snippets 2 mounted on a foam notebook A foam keyring embellished with Snippets 3 A butterfly name plate decorated with beads and Snippets 2