Rocky Mountain High

March 11, 2019March 4, 2019CraftyK Leave a comment

It’s my sister’s birthday today. While really looking at the walls at my parent’s house I have noticed just how many cross stitches there are adorning the walls. Some of them my sister made. I know one for sure was for me.

Now it’s my turn many years later to make one for her. Mine is by far simpler as it is only one color and only a few inches high and wide, but it’s the thought that counts right?

My sister loves the mountains. For a time she was going to move to Colorado however that hasn’t happened. She’s in Texas now, which is a bit different climate and view wise. I thought this simple image of mountains would be nice for her. She also did oil painting for a few years and many of those were of mountains. Again mine is not really comparable with its simplicity.

I finished the stitching in just a few days and started on the next one. It was coming up with how to mount this to a card that stumped me for the longest time. I couldn’t decide if I wanted to create a frame or put the raw fabric on black paper, maybe grey.

The first step to deciding was to browse my wallpaper collection. I wanted something with texture which just doesn’t happen with standard cardstock. Even wallpaper can be disappointing at times, there were some marble looking patterns that were on the smoothest paper you can find.

The paper I finally settled on was the first one I pulled out. It reminds me of rock and looks like a close up of a real mountain (at least to me). I think it really helps the stitching to stand out, yet adds another level of texture to the card overall.

I used my handy Cricut to cut out the wallpaper frame. Amazingly I measured correctly and didn’t cut off any stitching. Once I had it cut I was so glad I had enough cloth left at the top to run the bottom row of stitching along the bottom border of the frame.

This card is simple yet stands out to me. It’s quite striking now that it’s complete.

Stitching

Started: February 25th
Finished: February 28th

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THE Cowboy

February 23, 2019February 19, 2019CraftyK Leave a comment

This one was another stitching down to the wire. This card is also the largest card I’ve made with a cross stitch. I stitched out this pattern on 22 count off white Aida cloth using DMC 3371. I know this color quite well because I had to buy more of it to finish at the very end.

The amount of thread I had in this picture was what was left in my mom’s collection. Then I moved onto a (presumably) full skein from my cousin’s collection. Then had to finish with some from a brand new skein.

For being a non-contact-non-sport I hurt a lot after finishing this one. Hours and hours of hunching over to see the little holes has taken it’s toll. I also hand-held the thing which isn’t recommended. This pattern is over 90 stitches wide and 115 high.

To create this card I wanted to make it look “rustic”. That’s the word that comes to mind with ripped edges and a messy edge around the stitching. Assembly was pretty straight forward and old school. I got out my box cutter and ruler to cut out the paper for the card and inside piece.

After cutting the paper to the correct sizes I tore the paper. The inside piece took me a bit to figure out that if I ripped it one way the white from the back showed, however if I tried ripping “backwards” it looked so much better! Being a lefty is hard sometimes. I’m not one to rip paper so this was a new experience for me.

I’m glad this card came together quickly to be sent out. I’m not sure if this will make it to Texas by today for my uncle’s birthday, but it is on its way!

Stitching

Started: February 4th
Finished: February 18th

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Stormtrooper Line Up

February 9, 2019February 4, 2019CraftyK Leave a comment

My nephew Ben is going to start amassing quite the collection of Star Wars cards from me. I made one for his birthday last year and another for May 4th. Now he will have a more intricate card with Stormtroopers cross stitched on it.

This card is part of my 2019 project to finish one cross stitch card for every member of my mom’s side of the family who is over the age of 5 (had to draw the line somewhere). I am now in February and getting them done about a week before they need to arrive.

This pattern came from an official Star Wars cross stitch book. While it is available in Whole Foods, I went with Amazon (same difference right?) since it was slightly cheaper. I recreated the pattern in WinStitch so I could mark the stitches off as I went. The book doesn’t stay open the best either, so this was the easiest way to work.

It took a few days to complete the whole thing. Dark fabric 18 count is hard to work on! You need so much light to really see what the heck you’re doing. The black was even harder to see. Luckily a few days before I started my husband needed extra light and borrowed my knock-off ice light. After much frustration I remembered the light was in the next room and grabbed it for my purposes. Boy did it make a difference!

I was able to see what I was doing and finish stitching with much more ease. After I finished that part I pulled out the handy Cricut to cut my frame and text.

For the frame I wanted to have the cutout closer to the top of the card and give a little breathing room around the heads.

The text I did in Star Jedi font (pretty sure it’s on dafont.com) and added the lines at the top and bottom. I decided to do one long line of text and probably should have split it up. I think it still looks ok the way it is. Not sure that I got it straight though, I tried a few times laying it down before going with it.

On the inside of the card I used a couple of pages from an old daily calendar. I’ve been using these for my Star Wars cards and felt it was another good use of them just to add some color to the inside.

Stitching

Started: January 30th
Finished: February 3rd

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Yellow Bird

February 3, 2019February 1, 2019CraftyK Leave a comment

This little bird is tiny and somehow there are 13 different colors! I couldn’t believe it as I was collecting the thread/floss for this project. I must admit it looks pretty lifelike now that it’s done, so all those color changes were worth it.

This card is for my aunt whose birthday is today. I’m not sure on her age and feel it’s not appropriate to share anyway. She loves to photograph the birds that come to her backyard to eat and if they found a home in a birdhouse, sleep over. I am pretty sure I have seen some sort of black and yellow bird in her photos and this one made me think of her.

As you can see below this pattern came together extremely quickly, which is good because I was very much behind (and still am) on getting these done in a timely manner.

Because of the size I decided before I began this one would not be “framed” as I have done to many of the other patterns. I wanted to use my embossing machine again. I have a folder (I think that’s what those are called) with happy birthday all over it that I wanted to use. It’s similar to the Purple Morpho from last year.

Instead of using scrapbook paper I went with wallpaper. I did two colors and discovered that the softer less “papery” wallpaper does not emboss. I wasn’t sure how it would go and I was happy with either as the background, the silver won.

For mounting I used a small piece of grey paper foam tape mounted to the card then used some double sided tape and E-6000 for attaching the fabric to the paper.

Something I learned while studying for my CPP exam was that if you want to show texture, light from the side. So this go-round of highlighting the embossing on a card I was able to show better what it looks like.

Stitching

Started: January 28th
Finished: January 29th

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Young Chef

January 26, 2019January 15, 2019CraftyK Leave a comment

When looking for patterns for this project of cross stitch cards for my mom’s family I found most at dailycrossstitch.com. The patterns are pretty simple and small which works perfectly for cards. I don’t even think the patterns have backstitching or odd stitch sizes.

This is going to be a huge help with getting around 40 cards (might be over that?) done this year. January and June are the busiest months for birthdays so in between I need to keep cranking these cards out.

This card is for a second cousin of mine. His mom already has her card. Her son, while an avid football player, also enjoys cooking and baking. If I recall correctly he now has a Kitchen Aid mixer to aid in his baking endeavors.

So for his hobby of being in the kitchen I chose a chef pattern. I am trying very hard not to have a repeat pattern. Having many avid football fans in the family makes that a little more challenging and requires a little sleuthing to find additional interests.

I have many papers, but it was hard to find one that said “food” or “chef”. I ended up with a brown checkered pattern which mimics a traditional picnic blanket or pizza restaurant table cloth. This is actually wallpaper. I can’t imagine having something so dark on a wall, but I guess that’s why it’s now discontinued. It works well and doesn’t detract too much from the actual cross stitch.

To cut the paper I used my handy Cricut. It’s not perfect, but it gets the job done and I’m able to place the pattern neatly in the newly created frame. I mounted all of this with double sided tape onto my standard white cardstock.

Stitching

Started: December 31st
Finished: January 6th

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Thing 1 & Thing 1 & Thing 2,3,4

October 31, 2018October 28, 2018CraftyK Leave a comment

At my day job the team decided to dress up as Things 1-4 from Dr. Suess’s Cat in the Hat. While I chose not to participate in the donning of red leggings and blue wigs, I did come up with a way to celebrate with the team.

Most of the team partakes in coffee on the regular, so I thought cute coffee mugs could work as a fun add on to the theme (and a quick Google search inspired this). I went out and bought some white mugs and black 651 vinyl and got to work.

I did get lazy with trying to draw these all myself and found that people sell these ready to go in vector format on Etsy. This is where I got my version: JLCraftsCreations. (This takes you right to the item in her store)

Due to who is in and out and going to parties there are two Thing 1’s and then Things 2-4 for the rest of the team. The first go round I forgot to measure what size to make the circle, but I did remember 2 Thing 1’s. Second go round I make them the size I needed, but completely spaced the second Thing 1. Luckily I hadn’t closed anything yet and was able to whip out another Thing 1 on the Cricut. (Tip: you can select the little eyeball to hide any item in Cricut Design space you don’t want to “make” at the moment.)

While this was a fairly simple project, it still took quite a bit of time getting the pieces off the paper and onto the mug. I used Glad Press n’ Seal to lay the vinyl onto the mugs. Usually I think contact paper is recommended, but Press n’ Seal isn’t as sticky, but it does wrinkle easily.

Overall it was a fun little project to help me avoid doing actual work over the weekend.

I apologize for the lack of during photos. I did Snapchat some video, but unfortunately that can’t be uploaded to this blog due to restrictions on the free service.

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To the Graduate

May 19, 2018May 14, 2018CraftyK Leave a comment

This card is for my husband’s cousin. Today is his graduation party. I made this card the weekend before. Completely my own design! It was a bit of trial and error to make my own tassle.

This card I relied fairly heavily on the Cricut. The ‘Congrats’ is cut from Cricut‘s adhesive foil. The hat I drew and cut from wallpaper I have on hand.

The tassel was an interesting thing to make. I have some jewelry making supplies from years ago when I thought I could make jewelry (ha!). Anyway I would say don’t use memory wire, that stuff is stuck in whatever size it comes in. I did find a more flexible wire that wasn’t silver that worked really well to hold the thread together. (You might recognize the colors from my Mother in law’s Mother’s Day card)

I am planning to make another of these cards for my niece. I know her school colors, so I will work on a tassel in those colors and maybe integrate them more throughout the card. But for something generic and graduation, black and gold works well.

For the inside of this card I cam up with a “brilliant” way to put money in without it falling out right away. Using mounting tape I attached my white cardstock piece to the inside of the card. Since it’s raised slightly I was able to slip some money in behind the message and it stays pretty well!

This card has a lot of pieces that needed to be assembled, but I was able to do it all in maybe an hour or less. I was working on 4 cards that day and different pieces were cut and assembled at different times.

This post uses affiliate links. This just means that if you go to the site and end up buying something I’ll get a small percent, this doesn’t increase the cost to you at all. 🙂

Fur Babies Mug

February 23, 2018April 18, 2018CraftyK Leave a comment

I’m trying to branch out my crafting. Joining a few Cricut groups on Facebook at my cousin’s suggestion really spurs the creative juices. When I looked at my calendar for February I saw that a friend of mine had a birthday coming up. She is like me and loves her fur babies as her children, so I came up with this idea to send her a birthday gift.

This is my first exploration into iron on. That I didn’t even iron on. Since receiving a Cricut for Christmas, I have been exploring new crafting techniques. With it I have upped my card game and now have decorated a mug.

Since I started learning more about stamping and embossing I ended up with a heat gun. I thought that might be a way to adhere the iron on pieces to a mug. And it actually worked! I have a lower temp heat gun for the embossing so it probably took longer than normal to get everything to stick, but it worked nonetheless.

For this project I found a black mug and the white glitter iron on from Cricut. At first I was going to use vinyl, but then decided to try iron on after reading a couple blogs that made it seem possible to do.

Then I had to sit down and pick some fonts from my vast collection of them. Once I got that settled I laid it out in the Cricut design space. I made sure to attach the words “my”, “fur”, and “babies”. This is very important if you are using some sort of transfer tape. Which of course I didn’t. But I at least had the correct letters next to each other to easily transfer it by eyeballing it.

Here’s a close up of the finished mug, everything looks like it’s stuck down!

Now it’s time to ship it off and hope for the best on how long it lasts. I will be sending it with a cute note about it being handmade and it shouldn’t go in the dishwasher or microwave.

CraftyK's Projects

The place where I keep my crafting projects

Tag black

Rocky Mountain High

Stitching

THE Cowboy

Stitching

Stormtrooper Line Up

Stitching

Yellow Bird

Stitching

Young Chef

Stitching

To the Graduate

Fur Babies Mug