If you don’t want to read the nuances about the cards I created in 2022, this is where you can see them all by month of creation. Regardless of life circumstances I was determined to get some cards made.
Hope this provides some inspiration for your own cards!
Also on Instagram @craftyk.3
I wanted to make sure I had plenty of time to finish this one before my friend turned the big 4-0, in November. Clearly I was on top of it with plenty of time to spare.
I’m writing this in late July and you will be seeing this in November. I don’t want to share it early even though I’ll be sending it in a few days.
My friend is not only an amazing photographer and writer, she also has a passion for music. I found this pattern on dailycrossstitch.com and just had to make it for her.
I did a little modification of the pattern. For the arrows I used variegated thread to add some dimension. I also added backstitching around the word music. It wasn’t standing out enough against the lines.
I used a purple sparkle paper for the frame and cut it out with my Cricut. The back of the cross stitch is stabilized with interfacing fabric.
Started: March 30
Finished: April 10th
Stitching time: 11.25 hours
Also now on Instagram @craftyk.3
My brother turned 50 this month and is a lifelong Star Wars fan. Since this is a milestone birthday I decided to make a custom Yoda themed Star Wars card.
I sketched out a few ideas for this one. The wording was the hard part. Thankfully lots of people are Star Wars fans and I knew one of them had to have a “Yoda translator” and I was right. To get the translator to work, you need a decent number of words. After a few attempts I came up with something that I liked.
For the fonts, I have a couple of Star Wars options that I downloaded from dafont years ago. One has mostly letters and the other character and ship outlines. I found Yoda and got to work.
After laying it out I decided to fill the white space between the text with the rebel symbol. Behind that and Yoda I put in a couple of pages from my old daily calendar. Yoda is mounted with some mounting tape to give dimension.
Assembly on this one was challenging! I have not mastered transfer tape. In my case press n seal, so maybe it’s not as stable to work with. I ended up laying out all the letters by hand. Once I reached happy birthday I was determined to use the press n seal. It wasn’t perfect, but it is straighter than what I was able to do free hand.
Also now on Instagram @craftyk.3
I made this kit in 2021 and ended up getting another one. It’s a kit from 1988. Everything comes ready to make the card, including the envelope.
The last version of this card ended up going to my uncle for Christmas. This one will be going with all my cards to a friend’s craft fair booth.
It’s a straight forward pattern, only a few quarter stitches sprinkled in. French knots in metallic thread is the challenge with this pattern. Looks awesome when done, but not easy getting there. Metallic thread makes me nervous I guess. I can have very dry hands and pick that stuff up and I’m sweating like crazy and the thread just frays. I ran it through thread magic several times which kept it together a little longer this time.
I do struggle with picking which color to work on each time I finish a general area. There is a fair amount of “confetti” in this one. To keep stitches consistent a little planning is needed.
Started: September 16th
Finished: October 8th
Stitching time: 7.75 hours
Also now on Instagram @craftyk.3
In a panic I realized my mother in laws birthday was a little under 2 weeks away. I had all these ideas for gifts months ago and decided it was too early to start. Now it’s a bit too late.
What sparked my memory was a box of sandpaper and little wooden squares my mom had me make for her friends who were turning 70 and 80 years old. She found a card idea on Pinterest and asked if I could make the letters with my Cricut and if my husband could cut out the squares.
I still had leftover squares from the flurry of birthdays and got them out to start my own card. Since my mom didn’t take a photo of her cards, she told me to head over to Pinterest to see what these cards looked like. I took it from there and made my own version of the card.
Also now on Instagram @craftyk.3
This cross stitch pattern is from a kit that was supposed to be made into an ornament. I’m not a Christmas tree person and personally have no need for ornaments and turned this into a card instead.
While the design is small and seems easy, it was more challenging than I expected. Not only is it tiny (and a tiny piece of fabric provided) it has quite a few colors. Along with backstitching to finish it off.
The card was a multi-step process. After picking the paper, I decided I wanted to make it a frame. Because the pattern is small and no words are stitched on it I also wanted to add some text.
I’ve acquired many stamps over the last few years, but I have avoided Christmas ones. With no stamp and not wanting to handwrite anything I chose to use the writing feature of my Cricut. Since I don’t pay for Access that means any font I use is outlined and not a single line.
I decided that wasn’t a problem because I recently bought alcohol markers and could color it in. In my head I just made my own stamp. The nice thing about that was more color options and testing colors before working on the final version. No cleaning a stamp between color tests!
For this card everything is heald together with double sided tape. Nothing too fancy there. I did use interfacing fabric to seal off the back of the cross stitch.
Started: April 12
Finished: April 19
Stitching time: 4 hours
Also now on Instagram @craftyk.3
This card is involves a few of firsts for me. A sort of first to start things off, I thought I was going to make 2 of these. Instead of my usual one-of-a-kind. I had a piece of paper to stamp on big enough to stamp twice. I tried, but I underestimated how much ink was left and had a really faded version 2.
It all turned out ok, I used that second try to test out colors.
I learned that maybe spending a bunch of money on markers that have an extra fine tip might be worth it in the future. Most of the areas are so tiny I couldn’t color in the lines very well. I bought a fairly cheap set on Amazon. The review compared them to the name brand kind that have tri-tips, these only have chisel and brush.
Here’s the inside. It came in the box with the stamp on the front. Based on the packaging I’m pretty sure they are Stampin’ Up. I’m sure others have used this set and made much fancier cards.
I also took a photo from the bottom to show the depth with the foam tape. The wallpaper and cardstock paper are taped down and the cardstock with the stamping and coloring is mounted with foam tape.
I think this card looks awesome and it’s part of my personal collection. Someday the right person will come along that I just have to send it to them.
This card took a very long time in the making. I decided to stop assembling cards as I got things stitched. Little did I know this would take until the end of February to assemble and beginning of May to photograph for this blog!
In that time I did sign up on Instagram to show off cards this year. As I found a few people to follow I saw this cool thing of taking a baby food jar and storing thread scraps in it. I believe that person is keeping them all to put on display. For me it’s become the perfect portable trash can.
To finish this card I used a page from one of those small books of scrapbook paper. I bought 2 Christmas themed ones and thought this page was a good fit. Since the mouse has a little Santa hat I thought the “HO HO HO” was good. I would have preferred it to be on the right, but this is how the paper comes. The words were in the far bottom left of the sheet. The mistletoe having the green to tie the two together in a second way.
The base of the card is white cardstock with the front being taped on with double sided tape. The cross stitch is adhered with a piece of foam tape. I didn’t get it cut out the greatest, but it works and looks ok.
Started: October 31
Finished: November 6
Stitching time: 2 hours
If you don’t want to read the nuances about the cards I created in 2021, this is where you can see them all by month of creation. Due to continued life circumstances there are very few cards created. You can also use this to get some inspiration for your own cards!
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.
Started: September 1
Finished: October 3
Stitching time: 19 hours 15 minutes
