Scholarly Cat

When I asked my cousin what her sons like, I was told Larping. That is something I’m not sure has ever been captured in cross stitch form. I was also told they like cats (although one is allergic) and reading. Luckily these are things much more readily available in the cross stitching world.

all laid out

I found a pattern on dailycrossstitch.com with a cat sitting on a pile of books. This was the perfect fit! Logan is also off at college so the extra large books are also quite fitting for this stage in his life.

Yet again I found myself lost as to how I was going to assemble this card. The ideas aren’t coming like they were before. I’m in a Cross Stitch Club on Facebook and the day I finished this card she answered how she was able to cut around her patterns for cards and not have fraying.

Interfacing fabric. Who knew that you can make your own iron ons?! Luckily for me JoAnn’s was having a sale the weekend I learned of its existence, so I purchased a yard of the stuff to try for myself. Cost under a dollar with tax! Great price for trying out something new.

side view

You can see a little bit of separation of the interfacing fabric and the Aida cloth in the image above, but I don’t think it’s too bad for a first try. I was told it would be quite stiff, but it didn’t really do that to me. I think it was the kind of fabric I was sold, it was called “Lite” and I was told there were thicker ones, but the salesperson felt it probably wasn’t what I wanted. This seems to work ok, it holds well and give more “stiffness” to the piece than just tacking it on would.

from the side

The background is from my massive wallpaper collection. I thought the pattern fit a kind of Larping theme. It makes me think Medieval, something from a family crest maybe.

It was fun trying out a whole new way to mount a cross stitch to a card. Now I have square with frayed edges, mounted in a “frame”, and this, cut out no fray.

Stitching

Started: February 28th
Finished: March 10th

Follow along on Snapchat!

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full front of card

Fur Babies Mug

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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.

fur baby mug_0218_01For 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.

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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.