A Cat Made Cake

October 4, 2019September 30, 2019CraftyK Leave a comment

This card finishes out one of my cousin’s families. This particular card is for his wife. While I tried to make it the same size as the other cards, the stitching ended up being too large and had to be placed on a 5×7 card.

If you would like to see the rest of the family cards you can find my cousin, his oldest, and youngest. I can’t remember which one is allergic to cats, but they used to have a couple. I wanted to give them all cats they can keep. And probably includes some authentic cat fur in the mix, because, well, my cats like to leave their hair on everything!

I got the pattern for this card a long time ago off of the cross-stitching website. It is no longer available and I have been unable to find another copy. I believe it is in an old copy of The World of Cross Stitch magazine, but I have no idea how to get a hold of one since I am not in the UK.

This is the most adorable pattern and one of my favorite cards I have made this year. This one took a little longer than I expected. There is a lot of detail in it. So many colors to create all the shading. Then the backstitching took quite a while, but I finished that on a plane ride. Backstitching really does make a difference.

I used the Cricut to cut out the frame, the paper is from a book of scrapbook paper I bought at one point. It turned out a lot nicer than I expected when I picked the paper.

Stitching

Started: September 13th
Finished: September 26th

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Simple Cross

June 15, 2019June 5, 2019CraftyK Leave a comment

I’m not sure where to begin with this card. I made it for a second-cousin of mine. He’s been through a lot in his life and part of this cross stitch has a little extra meaning because of where the thread came from.

About 15 years ago my cousin and his family were in a terrible car accident. His wife died and one of his children was left with a brain injury. He’s recovered well beyond what was every expected for which we are all grateful.

It’s not easy to lose a parent. If I remember correctly he was about 6 years old. I know his mom loved cooking (which is why we have the family cookbook) and she cross stitched. At some point my mom ended up with her thread. It’s in a brown case, everything sorted out and each color braided onto the cards. To this day I cannot rebraid them if one becomes undone.

For this cross stitch I picked two colors from her collection. I went with blue, hoping it’s a color he likes. Blue is a pretty universal color. These two stood out, so going with “there’s a higher power” they must be what it should be.

The pattern is something I found online. I didn’t want anything too crazy and trying to search “cross cross stitch” doesn’t go so well, the internet doesn’t understand that I did mean to write cross twice.

The pattern had a circle element to it that I decided to leave off. I wanted to keep it simple, I liked the clean lines.

I used the Cricut to cut my frame. It took a few different papers to come to the plain grey. Again for the simplicity of it. I didn’t want to add any text, embossing or stamping. Just simple, especially because the thread in this case has more meaning than anything else.

Stitching

Started: May 30th
Finished: May 31st

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Rhino in a Tux

June 7, 2019June 3, 2019CraftyK Leave a comment

This card is for a cousin of mine who I hope likes rhinos. His company logo and business feature a rhino, and when I saw this pattern he was the first person who came to mind.

The Rhino in a Tux pattern cane be found at dailycrossstitch.com if you want to make it as well!

This pattern has very few colors and was pretty easy to make. Counting the body takes a little bit of time, but once that first row is done you can base most everything off of that to eliminate long lines of counting.

The pattern calls for Anchor thread, I converted to DMC since that is what I have. CyberStitchers has a simple conversion chart in case you ever need it.

To get this pattern to fit on a smaller card I used 18 count Aida cloth. This time around I decided to also do it with only 1 thread for the x’s. It looks find in person, however I noticed in the photos the black looks a bit thin/see through.

The whole thing was done with one thread, but for some reason black looks a little thinner than the rest. Probably the higher contrast between black and the white fabric. Either way, in person it doesn’t seem as thin.

For mounting I used my mom’s really old interfacing fabric (I think). It didn’t make it stiff really, but seems to be holding up for all the trimming I did without any fraying. I used foam tape to mount the rhino to the front of the card.

Stitching

Started: May 15th
Finished: May 21st

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Elephant Love

November 10, 2018October 22, 2018CraftyK Leave a comment

If you remember the elephant card I made for an August birthday, this one is quite different. This one I “designed” myself from different patterns I found for elephants and balloons. I did draw the grass myself. The happy birthday is a font from the WinStitch program I drew everything in.

I started this cross stitch on a Friday, did the majority of it at Side Projects Club on Saturday and finished up the back stitching on Sunday. Compared to the last card this one is much smaller and much easier due to the lack of quarter stitches.

Assembly came with some challenges. I have done enough of these to know that I would really prefer to get them in straight. I think I finally found a good way to accomplish this too!

Taking double sided tape I lined the edges closest to the hole I cut with the Cricut (well I cut the whole thing out of a 12×12 paper and scored it with the Cricut). Then I started to place the fabric down into the opening. I have learned that the fabric does not adhere to the tape right away, so there is opportunity to move it around to try and get it as straight as possible. I try to use the holes as a guide.

Since it’s not the stickiest thing ever it’s hard to truly “stretch” the fabric across without pulling it off somewhere, I was at least able to get it pretty darn close. Now it’s remembering this technique for the next one I do with a cut out…

To really hold it in place I cut out another piece (with the Cricut) the from the 12×12 page slightly smaller than the 4.25″ x 5.5″ side and used more double sided tape along the outer edges of that piece to adhere it to the inside of the card. From what I can tell this worked well since I had enough clearance on each side and the fabric is completely underneath.

Stitching

Started: October 18th
Finished: October 21st

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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.

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Baby Girl Princess Cross Stitch

May 12, 2017September 8, 2018CraftyK 1 Comment

UPDATE 11/24/17. Project is finished and framed!

UPDATE 10/21/17. Went to goal day meeting, met previous goal of finishing all stitching. Just the back stitching left now.

UPDATE 10/3/17. My dad passed this morning. Progress on this project has been put on hold for now.

UPDATE 9/23/17. Due to my dad being in hospice since mid-August I am now making loads of progress. I work on this every day while I’m up there. There are days when he sleeps a lot and others when we have time to visit. He has enjoyed seeing the progress made and how “full” it has gotten.

I finished the cross stitch for Brett yesterday and took it in for framing. I was told 2 weeks (sad) because they order frames on Wednesdays only. So me being slow didn’t finish until a Thursday.

Now it’s time to start birth sampler No. 3. As of yet there hasn’t been an announcement for baby 4. But I’m not ruling anything out at this point. Baby No. 3 was born at the end of January this year! So maybe she’ll have hers in a more timely manner.

I started this the evening of 5/11/17. (Yay documentation!) Usually I don’t start posting until I’m months in (and have no idea when I started), but I have vowed to be better about keeping up this blog, and with the Side Projects Club meetup I have motivation to work on these projects and *gasp* finish them. So if you want to follow the progress of this cross stitch from start to finish, just bookmark this blog, or maybe RSS it? I have no idea, but be sure to check back. It will be updated every 4 weeks (Goal Days at SPC).

Let the stitching begin!