Yesterday morning my ornament arrived by special delivery all the way from the wilds of Scotland:
It was made by Paula, and she knows me well. The design is from Dragon Dreams and is called Santa's Christmas Surprise, and although you can't see it in the picture, the backing fabric is a gorgeous dusky purple silk.
I will definitely be participating in more ornament exchanges in the future.
I have been stitching quite a bit, but I kept changing from one project to another for various reasons, meaning I didn't have any finishes to share, but now I do.
This year, for the first time ever, I joined in an ornament exchange being held on one of the forums I frequent.
I've never made an ornament before and I wanted to make a good impression, so I chose something I thought would be quite simple to make, a cube, and decided to stitch snowflakes on each side except one which would have initials and the year on it.
Of course this 'simple' idea turned into a much more involved task than I thought.
First off I needed some snowflake patterns and unlike some of my Google adventures, this one yielded results on my very first click, with The Floss Box. In fact I was spoilt for choice, but I managed to narrow it down to five designs that were all about the same size, and sufficiently different. Of course then I had another problem, after all I didn't want the finished cube to be huge and all those designs are about 40-60 stitches across. That's when things got a little crazy as I decided they would be stitched over one. Now I'm no stranger to stitching over one, but always before it's been solidly stitched designs and I've used tent stitch, but that wasn't going to work for these designs, so this would be my first experience actually cross stitching over one, and to a deadline to boot!
The fabric choice was easy, my partner was Linsday and I know her tastes very well, so I chose a dark purple fabric (Sparklies Basically Bonkers) on which I knew the white snowflakes would stand out well. I found that once I got into the swing of stitching over one properly, that it actually stitched up quite quickly and I soon had all the sides ready for construction. Fortunately it wasn't my first time out making up, having made a few biscornu in the past. I wanted to bead the edges as I was stitching them together, but didn't want to overpower the stitching, so I used petite seed beads, one on every stitch, which gave a lovely delicate line of beading. I used a oily finish clear bead (MH40161) and a purply/blue bead (MH40252) alternating between the two.
Finally I added some crystal bead drops to each of the points except the top one, where I put the hanging loop. For the drops and loop I used MH00161 and various shapes of Swarovski AB beads, bicones, rounds and droplets. I had all of these in my stash as I used to make jewellery before Ewok came along.
Now if you managed to make it this far through the rambling explanation you deserve some pictures, so here you are.
First off I scanned the stitching before I made the ornament:
And a couple of pictures of the finished ornament front and back.
Those last two pictures are a little washed out because I had to use the flash. Linsday has some more photos on her blog which show the colours a bit better.
I have to say I was very pleased with the finished ornament, although I was a little worried that I may have gone a bit over the top, but hey, it's Christmas.
Yes folks, this morning I was that hussy.
I've mentioned Swap-Bot before and this morning I recieved a parcel for a swap I took part in recently entitled 'Chocolate Bar and Yarn'. Fairly self-explanitory, the minimum of the swap was to send a bar of your favourite chocolate and a ball of your favourite yarn, with an approximate value of $10-$15, to your assigned partner. I say the minimum because you can always send more than that if you choose.
Because of the value and the fact that I had recently managed to pick up several balls of some of my favourite yarns very cheap in the sales, to my partner I sent 2 balls of Jaeger Roma and 3 balls of Wilko's Soft-n-Fluffy (yes Wilko's, 3 balls for a pound!), and for the chocolate, 3 of the small bars from Thorntons. My sendee was an ex-pat living in Europe so I thought she'd appreciate the taste of home, apparently so did her hubby *lol*
Anyway, to the point, my parcel arrived this morning from my sender (not the same person) and this is what was inside:
(Click for bigger)
The yarn is 100% cotton from Blue Sky Alpacas and is sooo soft and strokeable, I may have to add it to the Gloriana siks for a snuggle-n-stroke session. I also had a job on resisting the temptation to breakfast on chocolate. I suspect the sachet of hot chocolate may not make it until tomorrow as I usually have a mug of hot chocolate at bedtime.
This is bar far the best swap parcel I have recieved so far, not to say that the others weren't lovely, just not quite as accurate on my preferences, or as generous.
Right, there's a certain small someone pestering in a 'feed me' kind of way, and some chocolate to be refrigerated so I'd best finish up here.
I was recently introduced to this site when it was used to organise our stitching secret santa this year. The lady organising the SS used it because it automatically assigns partners for you, so even she didn't know who was sending to whom.
After our 'swap' had completed I decided to have a nosey around the site and see what other sorts of swaps were taking place. Well there's loads of them and I've been sucked into the whole experience.
Swap-Bot simply facilitates the process of setting up a swap that people (who meet the swap criteria) can join in. You can set up private swaps as well, the SS one was private.
In order to join in you need to register and set up an account and profile. The profile is where you put information about yourself, primarily interests, likes and dislikes. This is where your swap partners will look to get a feel for what to send you (within the confines of the swap). As an example I'm currently working on my item for a 'Handmade for you' swap. The parameters of the swap were to send one handmade item to one partner. As my thing is cross stitch that's how I'm making my item, having looked in my partners profile I discovered she likes small picture frames and her favourite colour is blue. So I'm making her a cross stitched photo frame in shades of blue.
I've also decided to have a stab at hosting a swap. This one is for sheets of papercrafting 'stickies', stickers, peel-offs, die cuts and rub-ons. Having bought a few bundles and TSV's from QVC I have loads of sheets of these that I'll never use because they're not to my taste. So the swap is to exchange two of these with each of two partners (so send out four sheets in total). It's an international swap and if your interested you can join in here: Stickies Swap.
Although the swap is restricted to people with a 4.5 rating, if you're new, signing up and you know me somehow (and I know you) then email me and let me know it's you before the sign up date and I won't block you. Or you could try and get in a couple of quick swaps before the closing date, you've got until the 31st Jan.
Steal this button HERE!
