Tag precious moments

side view of card

Birthday Giraffe

CraftyK Leave a comment

When I asked my cousin’s wife what were some things he likes (I did prompt with animals) she came back with giraffe. I don’t think this is a typical animal that people love, but it is fitting as he is well over 6 feet tall.

parts for giraffe

I immediately thought of looking through my Precious Moments books for a giraffe pattern and found this one. For some reason I think of Precious Moments when I think of this cousin. No idea why. Still after drawing the pattern, working on the pattern, nothing comes to mind that screams we have some event together that would make me think of them.

standing card

I used my WinStitch program to recreate the giraffe and added Happy Birthday text using a built in font. After starting I realized I had placed the text way too far from the giraffe. Luckily the file was saved and I was able to move it over and reprint the pattern. I’m not good at winging it, otherwise I would have tried to remember how far over I wanted to move everything.

To finish this one off I used the interfacing fabric again to stabilize it. Then gave myself a little more breathing room while measuring the cutout for the frame. I cut the green paper using the Cricut. Then double sided tape to hold it all together.

top corner

I use double sided tape twice for these, once around the frame and line up the stitching in it, getting it as straight as I can. It is movable which is nice. Then I put tape around the edges of the cardstock. I carefully place the frame with the fabric adhered to it onto the cardstock base and keep it as smooth as possible to prevent wrinkles and bubbles. I was impressed this one laid out very nicely.

I did some trimming at the end to remove any white edges from showing. I think the blade is getting dull, had to run it a few times making the card smaller and smaller before it cut smoothly.

Stitching

Started: April 14th
Finished: April 20th

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just the front

close up of stitching

H is for Heinrich

CraftyK Leave a comment

Remember the Lion for Liesel? This card is for her brother Heinrich.

Hippo start

These cards are a little different from my usual. I have a Precious Moments Alphabet book from the early 90s that has a cute image to go along with each letter. H is a “gender neutral” pattern with a hippo, the H is either in blue or pink depending on the sex of the person receiving it.

Hippo no backstitchUnlike many of the cross stitches I have worked on so far this year, this one required something called backstitching. I like to call it outlining as this makes more sense to most people.

Backstitching is done when you need more details in your pattern. As you can see this cross stitch looks a bit funny without any lines around the edges and even on the inside of the patter to bring out the details. It’s very 2 dimensional and not very clear without the details added.

Once the backstitching was completed It was time to add the interfacing to the back in hopes of keeping everything straight.

close up of glitter glue

I wanted to keep this card similar to Liesel’s and went with a blue paper for frame and blue glitter glue to finish it off. The blue paper I used is a bit on the thin side, almost like regular printer paper and less like a cardstock. It was from my collection of paper traditionally for scrapbooking. Because it was thinner and lighter I think that is why I had so much trouble with mounting anything well.

Full card standing

The cross stitch pulled up and to the right, not sure how it ended up stretch like that, but with the interfacing on it there’s not much to be done. I placed it in the frame as best I could and attempted to adhere it to the cardstock. This is when things really went wrong and the paper ended up bubbling creating the creases you see along the top and bottom corners on the right. These flaws make this a hand made project for sure.

Stitching

Started: March 22nd
Finished: March 31st

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Full front of Hippo card

L is for Liesel

CraftyK Leave a comment

This is a project I have thought about doing for years. I met my friend about 5 years ago, she already had her two children at the time around 6 and 3 years old. They were past the point of making birth samplers, but I wanted to make them something.

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During an estate sale my mom picked up some Precious Moments cross stitch books, one of them being the alphabet book. While some of the images with the letters would today be seen as offensive (I is Indian…N for girl is Nurse…M for boy is Mexican and for girl Mom…). I digress…The L in this case for boy and girl is Lion. So I was happy to move forward with creating this without worrying about offending someone.

When I started I thought this would be a large image because the pattern is pretty good sized. Once I went to cut the fabric I was in for a surprise. This pattern would fit on a card! So a card it will be.

Once I got through the lion (color changes and quarter stitches everywhere!) this project went pretty fast. This is also one of the few projects that I mostly used the correct DMC colors for. I haven’t done many projects with brown, especially light browns and tans, so I needed to go hunting for the real thing.

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After I finished assembling the card it looked a bit plain. Since this is for a 10 year old I thought maybe it needed a little something extra. I went into the spare room with all the random things and saw my glitter glue collection. That was the answer! I think it turned out pretty good for having the cats help me.

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Stitching

Started: June 16th
Finished: July 13th

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