I know I usually finish the backstitch a lot quicker than I have on this project, and that I promised a photo of the back of the stitching when I finished the backstitch, which I have not forgotten. I am sorry to those of you who have been waiting patiently for me to post said photos; I have a lot on my plate at the moment and am experiencing a nasty flare-up of my fibromyalgia. My hands are feeling a bit better today though (probably due to typing, strangely enough!) so I hope to finish this piece today and return with photos tomorrow. However, if I run out of thread, you may have to wait a little longer. Again, I’m sorry!

 

Anyway, as soon as I do finish it, I was going to start on the Fairy Mother And Child design by Joan Elliott as a birth sampler for my friend, whose baby is due at the end of January. However, I think I had better stitch a few more Christmas cards before I get carried away with that! I have not forgotten about the Christmas card page I promised, I have just been too busy to start it as yet (although you can actually see a slide-show on Flickr or Picasa and read something about them on my website).

 

In the meantime, thank you to everyone who has been commenting on my blog – I am glad that I can bring a little happiness to others with something that makes me happy to do. I hope you continue to enjoy reading my blog, and look forward to reading more of your kind comments. Of course, you are always welcome to e-mail me too! Don’t forget to check out my other blog too – it really is a little different to this one, probably because I only post once a week to that one, so I remember different stuff to write about!

 

Oh, and before I forget, I have joined Tumblr!

If you want to read the previous post, you will have to e-mail me for the password I’m afraid. Sorry about that!

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I have now finished all the cross stitch on Love’s Journey and am about to start the backstitch. Before I do that, however, I thought I would share a photo and ask for opinions.

 

Let me explain.

 

My husband always turns my stitching over to look at the back when I show it to him. He says it’s because he can’t believe how neat and tidy the back is. I disagree. Kind of. Yes, the stitching is tidy on the back when it is just cross stitch, but I think it is messy once I have added the backstitch.

 

Therefore, here is a photo of the back before the backstitch is added, and when I finish the backstitch I will post a photo of the back again and ask you all to vote as to which you think is tidy, or whether you agree with me or my husband…. lol!

 

And just in case you’re wondering, this is how the front looked this morning before I started stitching:

So I shall leave you there and I’ll be back when I’ve finished the backstitch (please don’t hold your breath; there’s quite a lot of backstitch on this one!)

I have been quite busy with the old needle and thread over the weekend, having got more than half way through Lesley Teare’s Love’s Journey, and have also managed to almost reach the heel of the first Flutter-by sock…

 

I suppose this should really be a longer post, but I’m getting a headache from the computer screen after re-installing the new Ubuntu release, so I’ll keep it quite short. Suffice to say that I am enjoying the Willow pattern cross stitch project, and will shortly be moving on to Christmas cards and another birth sampler. Hooray!!

 

Is anyone familiar with the old wives’ tale that bringing conkers into your home will vanquish all the spiders? I wasn’t, until hubby told me about it this morning. And I can certainly say that there is something about horse chestnuts that spiders definitely don’t like.

 

How do I know this?

 

Well, a month or so ago hubby went out for a drink with his best mate and on his walk home in the wee hours, he found a piece of a horse chestnut tree, which he brought home to practice carving it into something, not realising that it would have to season for a year before he could start using any tools on it. That’s right, a year. So this piece of wood is sat under our patio table, which is right outside our living room window.

 

So what? I hear you cry.

 

Well, when we got up this morning, we noticed that the hundreds of spiders that we have had hiding in various nooks and crannies in the house have disappeared.

 

And there are none in the garden.

 

I don’t like spiders, and usually ask hubby to get rid of them for me, but I do find it quite disturbing that they have all disappeared, even from the garden.

 

Ergo, it must be the huge lump of horse chestnut tree that’s drying out in our garden.

 

I wonder if our neighbours still have spiders in their houses and gardens?

 

In other news, I have now updated the cross stitch page on my website, so click on over and have a look (it’s not that much different to the blog, just I have added slideshows and stuff…) Please try to ignore the poor state of the knitting page. Thank you.

That’s right, peeps, I have finished the Jaywalker socks!! Here are some photos for you to drool over (if hand knitted socks are your thing):

The right foot from the front at floor level

The right foot along the inside

The whole sock laid flat in all its glory for you to admire

Probably the neatest instep and gusset I have ever knitted

Showing off the zig zags…

The right foot again from the front, but from slightly above…

And the left foot from the inside but strangely minus the heel

So now that I have finished knitting my gorgeous Jaywalkers, I have started knitting socks for Christmas presents. First up: Flutter-by socks (designed by librarygirl I think) for Emily in purple. Here’s a peek:

Pretty eh?!

I have finished stitching Midnight Mission by Lucie Heaton after a whopping 117 hours and 40 minutes! I am really pleased with the results and am looking forward to making it into a Christmas present sack for my niece – I hope my brother and his wife like it as much as I do! I promise I will post photos of the completed sack before I give it away!

So with Midnight Mission now completed, I have started on my in-laws’ Christmas present, Love’s Journey by Lesley Teare. It’s kind of a Willow-pattern design and is stitched in eight shades of blue with some bright white. I have worked 4 hours on it already and am enjoying it; it is completely different to Lucie Heaton’s Midnight Mission. My in-laws recently re-decorated their kitchen/breakfast room, well the breakfast area of that room anyway, and it is so different I hardly recognised it! They have painted the walls yellow and are going with a kind of Oriental theme with the pictures on the wall etc so I thought they would like this picture to hang with Irene’s appliqué pictures. I decided on this one because the appliqué pictures have a blue theme to them, so this will go with them quite well, plus as it is based on the Willow pattern plates (being of a blue and white theme themselves, in case you aren’t familiar with them) and so it has the Oriental theme they have decided upon. I don’t think it will take as long as Midnight Mission because for a start it’s not as big a picture, and also it’s not as densely stitched, with quite a few areas being left un-stitched. I have been unable to find a picture of the finished thing online, so have scanned the picture from the magazine in which the pattern appeared:

I’m looking forward to completing it!

 

But lets not forget that I am also knitting my Jaywalker socks; I have nearly finished them, and am just knitting the foot of the second one (having done the leg, heel and gusset). I will certainly be glad to finish this and get on with knitting the Christmas presents I have on my list, which are mainly socks!

My Mum had her Sou-A-Bazaar today (previously known as Soup Morning – like a coffee morning but with homemade soup) and two weeks ago she asked me to knit some Christmas decorations to sell. I was quite excited, but also a little anxious about the time-frame. In the end, by the time I had bought the wool and found the patterns, I only had a week in which to knit as many Christmas decorations as I could, and make a piece of jewellery for the raffle (which I had promised to do months beforehand).

It has been a tough week, but I succeeded in providing Mum with 17 mini stockings, two snowmen, a Christmas pudding, a little Santa, some Christmas bells and one pumpkin (I was trying to do some Hallowe’en bits as well, but ran out of time!). I hope the morning went well – I’m afraid I was unable to attend because I overdid it with the crafting – but thought you all might like to see some photos!

I actually double crocheted the bow for the bells, so I killed two birds with one stone, as they say, by knitting these decorations and teaching myself to crochet at the same time!

In addition to these, as mentioned above, I also made a bracelet:

I French-knitted some silver plated wire and then wove in some Swarovski crystals and silver seed beads. I finished it off with a handmade clasp and chain. Nice eh?

So now I am back to sock-knitting for Christmas presents and cross stitching Lucie Heaton’s Midnight Mission for Frankie’s Christmas present sack. I can’t wait to finish the last little bit so I can get on with the next project: Lesley Teare’s Willow-pattern-inspired Love’s Journey. I think it will be quite a challenge with only white and shades of blue used. Can’t wait!

Dear bloggers, the photos of the Walking Jay socks that I knitted for my husband are finally done! Kindly modelled by Penguinclaw himself, these are the photos that turned out the best:

Any comments?

I have also finished the fingerless gloves I was knitting for my Mum:

The first side…

… the other side…

… and kindly modelled by Mumsy herself!

I used the leftover Regia 4-ply exotic yarn from my stripey socks and Mum loved the colours! I have decided to knit socks for everyone this year, but as Mum doesn’t like to wear socks if she can help it, I think I’ll get another couple of balls of the Regia sock yarn (in a different colour-way!) and knit her another pair of fingerless gloves.

You may remember that, back at the end of August, I started to knit a pair of Jaywalker socks for myself. Well, things were going swimmingly, I was enjoying the stitch pattern and knitting along quite quickly, and before I knew it I had finished the first sock. So I started knitting the second one. Then, I decided to try on the first sock to show my husband or mother or someone how groovy it was, and lo and behold, it didn’t fit!!!! And because of the yarn I’m using, I couldn’t unpick it either!

So I started again, checking as I go that it will fit this time! I have nearly finished sock 1, and can’t wait to finish sock 2 so I can show them off! Then, I’m afraid, I’ll be sock knitting for Christmas! (as well as cross stitching, of course, but only the two projects there!)..

In other news, I have finished stitching my Bohemia T-shirt and you can view a slideshow at Picasa or Flickr. I love it and can’t wait to wear it!

My husband and I moved house last year, as you know, and we weren’t allowed to decorate it for the first year because it was a new build. Well, the first year has come to an end, and we have decided that we don’t actually want to decorate in the traditional sense, as in painting the walls. In stead, we have decided to have a colour theme in each room for the curtains and accessories, but keep the walls the magnolia colour and decorate them with our own artwork instead.

When we moved, we needed a new sofa, so we went hunting for one and found a lovely one at a bargain price. The problem was, it didn’t really match the “natural” colour scheme we had started in the living room. So we bought a throw and that was fine.

Until I washed it.

It didn’t shrink very much, just enough to not comfortably cover the arms any more.

So we have been toying with the idea of making some armrest covers to protect the arms from getting grubby. They needed to be functional yet attractive and match our colour scheme. And not old-fashioned, as armrest covers usually are (so that ruled out flowers!). Then my husband, as a joke, suggested the Ubuntu logo.

For those of you who are not familiar with anything other than Microsoft Windows, I should explain that Linux is an open-source alternative to Windows XP or Vista, or Mac OSX. There are many different versions (or “flavours”) of Linux you can use on your computer, and the software is free. It is kind of a community, and is all about what computing was originally about; i.e. writing a program etc. and making the source code available to everyone, so that anyone who wants to can modify or change or improve the program (of course, you don’t have to do that!). Ubuntu is my particular Linux “flavour” of choice.

The Ubuntu logo  goes with any shade of brown you can think of (as it tries to be as human-friendly as possible, and their default colour scheme is supposed to be a mixture of every skin tone on the planet).

Back to the narrative, my husband suggested the Ubuntu logo for our armrest covers. We talked it over for a few days, and eventually came up with a design of several different sized Ubuntu logos randomly placed, which I turned into a cross stitch chart so I can cross stitch it onto some chocolate brown 32-count Belfast evenweave. I can’t wait for the supplies to arrive! Of course, it’s going to take me some time to stitch two of these armrest covers, but the end result will certainly be worth it! What do you think?

“But it’s not even October!” I hear you cry. I know, but I felt like being selfish for a little while so I’m cross stitching myself a t-shirt. The design is by Emily Peacock, who usually designs tapestry work but designed this for Cross Stitcher magazine earlier this year. I was quite taken by the design and have taken my time about getting the bits and pieces I needed (the variegated stranded cotton, the soluble/waste canvas, t-shirt etc), but now that I have all the pieces I need, and Midnight Mission is coming along well, I thought I deserved a break from making things for other people just long enough to stitch this small design. I only did a couple of hours on it last night, but hope to finish it fairly quickly.

It will (eventually) say “Dare to be Different”. I like this idea, and may well be creating t-shirts with other slogans and pictures on them.

MidnightMissionDay12.jpeg

Originally uploaded by craftgirl78-xstitch

At the end of 12 days’ stitching, I can see that I am definitely on the home-run, as I have certainly stitched more than half of this project now. I can’t wait to finish it and start the next project, but this is such an enjoyable stitch that I don’t want to finish it. Hmmm. Conundrum. Well, I can’t delay finishing it forever; it is a Christmas present after all!

I have amended my web album slightly, in that you can now find full-sized images of this WIP on Picasa. No changes on Flickr though, I’m afraid!

I finally got around to dying the fabric for Joan Elliott’s Sea Goddess, and decided that, while I was at it, I would dye another piece for her Fairy Mother And Child, which I will be stitching for a friend who is expecting a baby due at the end of January. I can’t wait to start stitching either of them, and I am really pleased with the results of my first dye attempt: I have blotch-dyed both fabrics first with Dylon China Blue, then with Dylon Bahama Blue. I think they look quite good:

This one is for the Fairy Mother and Child birth sampler…

…and this one is for the Sea Goddess

Meanwhile, I am still stitching Lucie Heaton’s Midnight Mission Santa sack for Frankie. It’s coming along quite well – I think I’m about half way through, so it should be all down-hill from here!