Cross stitch

It's amazing what you can accomplish when you're supposed to be doing something else. I have been swept away on a tide of cross stitch, and it has yet to deposite me back with my pending WIP's. Because of this I am making little progress with my granny square blanket and the loom beading has been discarded. It hasn't stopped me from looking at reference books on loom beading, though!
I find my cross stitch obsession funny; I would never have seen myself as a cross stitch kind of girl. In the past I have avoided cross stitch because I didn't see the place in my life for twee pictures rendered in thread. All this changed when I saw an Avengers Assemble project, soon I was being pulled down the cross stitch rabbit hole to Subversive Cross Stitch and other such delights.

During half term I found myself using up the last of my patience teaching my middle daughter and her friends to cross stitch. I have to admit that my irritation threshold for repeating myself is very low, thus I make a terrible craft teacher. One of the girls really took to cross stitch so this perked me up out of my grump.Then I decided to cross stitch LO a picture.

I started with the pattern of the girl. My daughter chose her hair and I chose the dress colour. She seemed a bit lonely just sitting there on the Aida so I put a pink border round her, but it didn't look right so I unpicked it. I thought for a bit and chose another one of the motifs out of the magazine and stitched it around the girl. working out the pattern was difficult because I have the attention span of a flea and you need one to count the itty bitty squares. In the end it turned out fine, just a quick bit of centering and it was as if they had meant to be together! In keeping with my cross stitch free life this one will be being framed in an oval frame and hung in my daughters bedroom.

Whilst I was on with the threads I thought I'd have a go at freehand embroidering a bird onto some vintage linens I was given. I have this book from the library called The Stitch Bible which  contains a beautiful blackwork bird pattern that I decided I'd try. I didn't have the correct material so I just started to copy it with my own flourish and this is how it turned out.

I love it! It needs some tweaking around the tummy but other than that I really enjoyed making it.

One of my friends had a beautiful hand embroidered romper suit that was given to her baby daughter as a welcome gift and I coveted it, so much so that I think I'll be making a couple of my own now that I have embroidery skills.

I'm not sure how long this diversion will last as I've been looking through the Craft book I got for Christmas. There are loads of cool things to make in there, next up is probably going to be some tie dying in spirals. Hopefully this avoidance of pending WIP's will end very soon and I can show off my gorgeous new blanket to you all.