My latest finished project

I have to jump out of order here, before I start my MANY posts about our summer beach vacation, to show off my latest finished cross stitch project! I am so excited for it to be done, as I've been working on it for over 4 years. It's taken this long because a) I've had less time in general to stitch than I used to; b) I spend a lot of my evenings on photos now, not stitching; and c) I did switch to one other project in the middle, which delayed this one.

I found this pattern on my favorite website, MysticStitch.com. I bought it a while back when they had one of their deals (they often will do buy 2 get 2 free), and it was one I was very excited to do. The plan has always been to put it in our library area (you'll see why below), but it was daunting to start given that it's the largest cross stitch that I have ever created! Uncounted hours of work have gone into this, and I could not be happier with the finished project. So, time to show it off!

Note that these photos were taken with my iPhone, before it has been stretched and mounted, so please forgive that there are some wrinkles and bumps in the fabric - I did my best to eliminate those!

There's so much in there that I want to give you some close-ups so that you can see the detail.

I love how the colors in the peacock feathers change. It's subtle, but I think you can see below that the white in the top and left peacock markings changes to a light blue as you go down and to the right. It's a bit more obvious in person, and imitates how the colors of the feathers would change in reality.

I said above that this was the largest one I'd ever done; I had Evan take a photo of me holding it for scale. This thing is easily two feet tall (I think it may actually be more); it really is the most work I've ever put into one of my creations.

I know this is NOT going to be cheap to frame, so I've got to find a good framing deal before I do it. I can't wait to pick out a mat and frame to match, then get it up on the wall of our library!

Two completed projects

I wanted to quickly share two cross stitch projects that I completed recently. The first was for Kathy's little girl Katie for her nursery. Here's the completed cross stitch (sorry that I can't get it facing the right way; something isn't working right). I love the mom and baby animals, and the colors!

 However, you can see the many wrinkles - I couldn't give it to her like that. Plus, it needed a frame! So, I ironed the crap out of it (the kids thought that part was fascinating), and found a great white frame (the walls of Katie's room are yellow so it will stand out nicely), and framed it (which involved some alignment and trimming).

 And...voila! Final project. Sorry for the washed out colors - I didn't realize it wasn't super vibrant until after I downloaded the photos off my camera, and now it's not at my house any more to take a new photo! But I'm very happy with how it came out, and I think Kathy is as well, which is really the most important part.

Second, I found a fun, inexpensive ballerina pattern online. I changed a couple of the colors and decided to put it on a pink fabric background to make it even girlier. It turned out to be much larger than I realized, and luckily I was able to find a ready-made black frame to put it in.

If you look closely, you can tell that the ballerinas ended up not centered on the fabric (totally my fault - failure of counting it seems!). So, before framing, I wanted to add something to balance it a bit. Here's the final project with my additions:

I really love how it came out! And, instead of hanging this in Natalie's room as originally intended, I'm trying to sell it at Tiny Toes Dance Academy (there's a gift shop there). So far it's been up about 10 days, with no takers, but I'm hopeful that someone will love it a little girl in their life. I've started the same thing for Natalie, but on black fabric with gray silhouettes and bright blue, pink, and purple costumes, and would definitely do custom designs if asked. That's on hold for a bit as I work on something else, but it'll get finished one of these days! Thanks for looking at my work :)

A new distraction

My first post from the blogger app! I'm not sure if it's a good thing that I know how to do this now or not :)
Note: This didn't quite work as I'd hoped. The blogger app didn't want to publish this post with the photo attached, so I ended up doing a fun technology work around: took the photo on my phone, emailed it to myself, downloaded it into Picasa and then easily blogged it here. Not too bad....but still required pulling out my laptop. Anyway...

Update 2: the original way I tried to post the photo didn't work either, so I had to relink it into the post. Should work now! Sorry about that.

It happens periodically that I slack off on posting here. The reason is always different - sometimes work, kids, lack of desire, etc. This time it's my other hobby (not photography): cross stitching! I started a new pattern for Natalie's room and I'm really enjoying it. here's the first 3 nights of work on my new one- can you figure out what it is?!

 I'm also about to order some new fabric so that I can work on a large one for someone in my family...the goal was to finish that one by October, but I highly doubt that will happen now. However, both of these should be great projects to work on!

Distraction

I've actually been home the vast majority of the past two weeks, with the exception of the night I spent down in Richmond for work and to pick up Natalie. Hence the little splurge of posts I did last week. What's kept me from posting over the past week? I've been distracted by my latest cross stitch project! Here's what it's supposed to look like:

I wasn't sure when I started it that I was going to like it - I started in the center, as you're supposed to, and the colors in the star were kind of boring. It's for Carrie; she picked it out to go with some of the nautical things in her apartment, so I stuck with it. Turns out that I really like the colors and am having a lot of fun working on it! Here's the first 5 pages I had done.

You can see that even with the lighting issues, the colors are darker and tend towards more browns than yellow/tan. I'm really liking it! I've now finished almost the whole page under the bottle top on the left, and finally getting into the blue cabinet on the bottom. So, since I'm enjoying making it so much, I'm not pulling up my computer at night much! Plus, since the apps on my new iPhone are so fantastic I can do almost anything from my phone and barely need the computer. I'll try to get the July 4th trip photos up here soon, so I don't end up weeks behind again!

I finished it!

I know I've got a tab on this blog for my cross stitch projects, and I do plan on updating it at some point soon, I promise! But for now, this will have to suffice: photos of my most recent project - a growth chart for the kids! It took a couple of months to finish, mostly because of the length

The heights go from 24" to 60", and when you add in the decoration at top and bottom, there's almost 5' of fabric that was stitched! It's quite narrow, which made the progress go faster, but even so it took a while. I tried to take a more close-up series of pictures so you could see more detail; it's not perfectly stitched together, but you can get more detail on how it looks. Overall, I'm very happy with how it came out - now I just have to figure out how I want to hang it and start marking the kids' heights!