Cross stitch in Progress 4

As you can see, I didn't get it finished for Christmas!  I must admit, now I no longer have a deadline, my motivation has decreased a bit and I am now heartily fed up with it!

The seven trees are now done, complete with all their snow, so all I have left is the snowy ground beneath them and the snowflakes which surround them.  The ground is half cross stitch and will be quite quick to do, I have made a start on that, which you can just about see, the light is awful for photos at the moment!
It will definitely be done by next Christmas, honest.......

Cross stitch in progress 3

Another update on the Nine Trees :-)  It looks a little lumpy in the photo as I have the frame hanging off my steering wheel LOL.

I plan to finish the central seven trees and then see how to get around the fabric problem - it's not quite wide enough to have an ideal amount of excess on each side for framing, so it would have been tight anyway, plus I started half an inch to the left of where I should have.  There are two options, doing seven and two separate ones to form a triptych, as I mentioned in the last update.  Or..... I might be able to swap the two end trees with each other - the furthest left tree is 35 stitches wide and will not fit onto the fabric with enough left for framing, but the furthest right tree is only 23 stitches wide.  12 stitches difference is nearly an inch and I think it will work :-)
Watch this space!

Cross stitch in progress 2

Here is the fortnightly update on my current cross stitch project.  I took the photo in the car, thinking that daylight would be helpful, but it was so dismal outside that those trees still look more black than green!

I do have a slight concern with this project - the instructions say the finished design is about 17" long, so I have used a 21" wide piece of fabric.  This should leave 2" at each end, right?  However the tree at the farthest left will fit, but with only half an inch to spare which could affect framing.  I haven't counted out the trees to the right hand side yet, and I do know that I started slightly left of the fabric centre ..... but not by that much!  The middle tree, incidentally, is the one which is currently showing as second from the right :-)

So I have started a few stitches for each of the tree trunks, to see what the spacing is.  I didn't quite get them all done this morning.  I don't think I can just take one tree out of the design, that would leave eight and odd numbers are more pleasing to the eye!  So I would have to take it down to seven, maybe doing the remaining two as separate pieces, thus making a tryptich to hang on the wall!  We shall see......

Cross Stitch in Progress

I thought I would chart the progress of my current cross stitch project.  So far I have been stitching this for 10 - 15 minutes in the mornings before work, plus I was able to get a good couple of hours in at the crop.  There are nine different trees all together, with some 'snowy' ground beneath them and a lot of snowflakes swirling around them.  I have completed one tree so far and am working on the second :-)  The original chart has letters in the tree trunks spelling 'Welcome', but I didn't like that.  It is quite a long and thin design, about 18" x 6" so will fit nicely above a window.

The lighting is not very good, the trees are actually a deep green, not almost black as they appear here!  Hopefully it will be completed in time for Christmas :-)

Cross stitch disappointment!

A few months ago, I started stitching for 10 or 15 minutes every morning, sitting in my car before work.  I have already blogged the Sun Dragon made in this way here, but there was a piece before that, which turned out to be a bit of a disappointment :-(

It's quite simple, lots of squares in various colours - it was a chart from a very old issue of Cross Stitcher magazine, I think.  After I had finished it, I made the mistake of not taking it off the frame immediately and it was left in its carry bag for about three months.  When I came to take it off and frame it, I discovered two things.  One :- the frame had marked the fabric, quite close to the stitching.  Two :- the dimensions of the design would not fit into any standard sized frame.  You would think I could have noticed that whilst stitching, but there you go :-)

So my options were limited - I couldn't cut the whole piece of fabric to a standard size because of the frame marks on the fabric and I couldn't fit just the stitching with a narrow fabric border into a smaller frame because it wasn't a standard size.  I ended up cutting a piece of self adhesive mountboard to size, attached the stitching to it, then attached the whole thing onto another piece of standard frame sized mountboard covered with toning paper.  Then I put it into a frame so that it was protected under glass.

And ... I don't like it.  The design of squares is a nice idea, but I don't like the colours, I think the overall impression of them is too dark, even with some light colours in there - which I did notice whilst I was stitching but only towards the end when it all came together and I persuaded myself that it would be fine, really :-)  Then there is the size issue ......

I think that what I will do at some point, is re-chart the design, expanding it into a standard size and using different colours.  It's not going to be soon, though ......

In the meantime, Sy likes it, so she received an unexpected gift LOL.

Sun and Moon Dragons

For the first day of Blogtoberfest, it seems right that I share this project, as it has been so long in the making and now is finally finished! 
About 12 or 15 years ago, I bought a self-published cross stitch chart booklet from a charity shop.  It was called the Moongate Book of Dragons and I painstakingly copied the Moongate Dragon chart into my cross stitch software (Easy Cross) to make it easier to work from, then stitched it.

It was my intention to then change the colours to make a Sun Dragon and flip the chart so I would have a pair of dragons facing each other.  But before I got around to doing that, we had a computer crash, I had to re-install the software and all my previous files had been corrupted.  It meant putting in the entire chart again, square by square and I couldn't face it at the time!

Fast forward 12 or 15 years ....... I bit the bullet (been doing a lot of that recently .....) and redid the chart.  Stitching in my car before work every morning and also putting in a few hours at crops, meant I finished it in three months, which is probably something of a record for me!

Here is the Moon:

And the Sun:

Both together:

Hung in their final positions above the window:

The Sun Dragon is stitched on light blue fabric, though it does appear white when hung next to the other one LOL.

I am so pleased to have finished them off, finally!

Cross stitch UFO - finished!

I bought three of these Sunset kits, by Derwentwater I believe, several years ago at a stitching show in Brighton.  They have each taken about three years to complete, not because they are large ..... or difficult ..... but because I lost enthusiasm very quickly on each of them.  I even bought three frames, framed the first two and put all three frames on the wall so the empty one would act as motivation!  Didn't work ...... :-)

But finally I have finished, here it is:

Here are all three in their long-awaited glory - difficult to photograph because they are on the stairway wall, so I can only get the width of the stairs away from them to take the picture!  But I think you can get the idea :-)

There are several more in the same series and they are all lovely.  But for me, three is enough :-)  I have many, many UFO cross stitch kits, so it's on to the next one!

52 card challenge - week 22

The prompt for week 22 is 'feathered friends'.

I found some free magazine papers (from Making Cards) featuring owls, so that was perfect.  I cut a central strip and the tag from two patterned papers and then punched out one of the toppers.  The doily lace borders are done with a Dienamics die.  Then it was just a matter of assembling it all - I wrapped the tag with ribbon then added an eyelet (another one gone! yay!) and some pearls.

The Christmas robin is from a little kit, not very expensive and I already had it halfway done, it's my holiday stitching :-)  I couldn't find a robin stamp in all my many Christmas stamps, so I delved into my suitcase to find this kit.  I finished it off at the crop, swearing all the while .... I hate backstitch!  It does look rather nice now it's done - I didn't follow the chart faithfully, it had the black backstitch going round the snow, which just wouldn't have looked right.  I have a couple more of these kits somewhere, so I will have to pack one of them back into my holiday suitcase!  I ran an aperture card blank through the Bigshot in an embossing folder, assembled, then cut the card down into a square.

And after I had done all that, I remembered that I have a 'partridge in a pear tree' stamp.....!!!  argh!!!

Poinsettia

This is the cross stitch piece I finally finished last weekend, having started it in March 2010, and I have now put it into a frame. It's a kit from a magazine and came supplied with the green fabric - if I had had the sense to start stitching the green leaves first, rather than all the red poinsettia, I would have switched to ivory fabric as the green on green was quite tricky! But since I had done all the red, I decided to carry on regardless :-)

The original design had the frame and swirls stitched in gold metallic thread, which I found absolutely impossible to use, so I bought some ecru floss and mixed it with gold blending filament and it has come out rather well.

It has been going for so long now that I am quite fed up with it! But hopefully, by the time next Christmas comes, I will like it again :-)