Hocus Pocus cross stitch card

It’s been a few years since I bought the Halloween Special Edition of Just Cross Stitch magazine. This year’s inspiration buy was because of someone I recently got to know a bit better. We worked together at my day job until she left to start her crafting venture Uniquely Crafted.

Now that you have checked out her awesomeness, here is the card I made for her. The pattern came from the 2021 Halloween issue of Just Cross Stitch. She likes coffee and Hocus Pocus so this was perfect!

The original pattern was to be stitched on 28 count and would end up a little larger than a 5×7. I stitched this on 18 count to make it just under 5×7 to fit on a card.

The designer of this pattern did a great job with the colors for the word coffee. As someone I showed the finished piece to said, “very nice ombré.” It’s not variegated thread, it’s 4 colors. I barely had any left of one of the colors and managed to ration it just enough to have just a little leftover.

Since I changed the count this was supposed to be on the spiderwebs were extremely challenging to stitch. Lots of odd counting and trying to make new holes in the middle of things. They look awesome, but not fun when you go changing things around from what was intended.

Besides taking much longer to stitch than expected this was a fun project to make. For the inside of the card I added some pumpkin paper to bring some color to the card.

Stitching

Started: September 1

Finished: October 3

Stitching time: 19 hours 15 minutes

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

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)

mug with care instructions

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.)

care instruction cut out

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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line up of mugs 1-4