Embroidery Love

Whilst I am certain my heart will always belong to crochet, a little chunk of it is slowly being given over to my newest hobby; embroidery.  I know it sounds pretty old-school, but I can't get enough of it!  So imagine how excited I was to win a Twitter competition and 20 skeins of  beautiful bright threads!  It was simple enough; Cross Stitch Crazy Magazine were giving away some DMC embroidery threads if you correctly guessed how many boxes of threads were in the picture and I managed to get it spot on (Yes, I had a lot of time on my hands that day and it was a combination of counting and clever calculation).  When Cross Stitch Crazy Magazine tweeted me whilst I was at work to tell me I was the winner, it absolutely made my day!  

The threads arrived quickly afterwards and there was some really lovely colour choices in there:

Today I made the most of the lovely little hint of sunshine that has covered the UK and spent some time in the garden organising my stash which has quite quickly spiralled out of control.   But oh how time consuming it was!  It's surprising how long it takes to wind these little bobbins and about half way through I wondered if I really needed to do it or if I could just shove the skeins in a drawer and pretend they weren't getting tangled, but knew that really that wouldn't work.  I stopped after I'd finished the pinks, purples and yellows...

But there's still a heap of blues and greens to go... (even with my furry little one 'helping')

So that should keep me busy for the next few nights after work!  How do you store your embroidery threads?

Mrs Many Projects

I am one of those annoying people who starts lots of different things without getting round to finishing any of them.  Rather like a magpie, I get easily distracted by anything remotely cute/shiny/new and need, yes need, to start it right then and there and it will be all consuming, if only for a short while.  

Now I know that this is how my brain thinks, so I do try to work against it, but there are some things I find it hard to resist.  And this is exactly what happened with embroidery.  I've considered it for a while (you may remember that my parents helpfully brought me back an embroidery kit from Australia over Christmas) but my Twitter feed has been full with the buzz of Wild Olive's Spring Stitching Club over the past few days and I thought that it would be rude not to take a sneaky peak to see what all the fuss was about.  

So I looked... and there was the cutest little bunny design staring back at me!  It looked like a fairly simple pattern, running stitch I think, and I started to hear my brain whisper  "Doesn't that look like the perfect starter embroidery pattern?"  "How hard could it be, surely it's worth a try?" "It's just a few dollars, what great value it is for 12 patterns."  Well, how could I fight my own well argued logic?!  So I signed up, but the official patterns don't start until March and I'd really started to get excited about my adventure into embroidery so I thought I'd just perhaps have a little look on Wild Olive's Etsy page to see if there was anything that might take my fancy.  And there was:

A cute set of crafting designs including a crochet hook, yarn ball and lots of other things with happy little faces!  I downloaded the pattern and then headed off to my local curtain shop to buy some supplies.  Yep, curtain shop.  I don't really understand either.  It's predominantly a curtain shop but luckily for me, also has a small section of yarn and needlecraft supplies which included some embroidery hoops, threads and needles.  I spent a while choosing my colours - grey orange and teal green were scooped up without hesitation - and hurried home.

The next hurdle was what to embroider on.  The most appropriately thick fabric I could find was some Clark and Clark (gasp) semi expensive stuff I had stashed in my little craft room.  Justifying that this really was an emergency, I cut off some of the beautiful fabric turned it over to use the back (gasp) traced on the design and stretched it over the hoop.  

I was surprised by the simplicity of embroidery designs.  No guidance on stitches, no real guidance on colour or how to move around the design, just a black and white line drawing of  my smiley little yarn ball.  Still, as someone who has absolutely no drawing skills whatsoever, it was just what I needed.  I read over Wild Olive's embroidery basics series and decided to do a bit of running stitch for the face and split stitch for the yarn bits (check me out using the lingo like a pro!) 

It turned out much better than I expected for a first attempt.  A few too many stitches bottom right so it became a little squared off, but overall, I was pretty pleased.  The back is less neat, and I understand that a good embroiderer (embroiderist, embroidologist?) has as pretty a back as front, but I guess that all comes with time.  

Have I caught the bug?  Absolutely!  I think embroidery will be a nice little addition to crocheting without straying too far from the path.  There's lots of really cute designs out there and I've flooded my Pinterest  with ideas, examples and designs.  Hop over and take a look :) 

Projects, Projects, Projects!

Arrgggh, what a miserable day it is.  Rain, rain, rain.  Poor Squitchy is feeling very sorry for himself as I won't leave the back door open for him to wander in and out of the house as he pleases, and so he's curled up on the sofa, occasionally huffing to make sure we know that he is one unhappy husky.

It is not such a problem for me though as I have plenty of projects to keep me busy.  Usually, January is the month that drags on forever where I have to watch every penny to make sure I can make it through to the 25th (otherwise known as payday).  And there's so many temptations; a final dash for some extra christmas presents, sales, splashing out for my birthday, January is definitely there to test me.  But not this year, no.  This year, it seems like I've been much more in control (plus I was very lucky to get money/vouchers for Christmas and birthday so I didn't have to dip into my bank account too much) and so I've had a little bit spare.  And what better way to spend it then buying more crafty goodness!  I hadn't really realised just how much I've purchased until I had to try and find a home for it in my craft room, instead of my usual spread around the house approach.  

There's been a couple of books:

First up is modern baby crochet by my fav, Stacey Trock of Fresh Stitches fame.  Yep, I know I bang on about Fresh Stitches, but I genuinely love love love her stuff.  Now, I'm not a baby person, (I spend all day with other people's kids, it's enough to put anyone off!) but whilst this book certainly has a focus on designs for a new baby's room, there's so many other things in it that would work in any house.  I've already made a cute little amigurumi bird, but have my eye on the sea urchin pouf (I started making a pouf ages ago with Zpagetti yarn and it looks pretty average.  I want to frog it, but know how long it took me to get that far.  Maybe this is the push I need) the asymmetrical basket-weave blanket and the colourful wiggle pillow (which my sister has also put in an order for already).  

Then I bought My Crochet Doll by Isabelle Kessedjian.  This is a truly beautiful book; the first half is photos showing all the items in the book, laid out in a really inviting way that makes you want to make everything on each page RIGHT NOW!  I love that the crochet doll is in fact just a tiny part of the focus of this book; it's all the accessories that go with it that catch my eye, like the teeny tiny camera, or the little bucket and spade for the beach.  My particular favourites are:

There have been a couple of other pattern purchases, but these are for top secret projects and will be revealed all in good time :) 

I've also bought my first big yarn pack of the year, from Wool Warehouse, the Attic 24 colour pack.  17 skeins of Stylecraft Special DK in an Attic 24 inspired colour range. When I opened my huge bag, I was a little uncertain as to how this might pan out.  Not all the colours were those that I would pick myself, and certainly weren't ones I've put together in one project.  But I don't know why I doubted Lucy, it's not often she gets her colours wrong.  I've already made a good start by following her granny stripe tutorial:

...but being that it's 240 stitches across (about the size of a double bed) I've still got a long way to go!  I've decided to weave in the ends every so often so I don't have a big pile to work through at the end.  I'm sure you will be hearing a lot about this blanket over the coming months ;)

I was also very lucky that timing paid off in my favour.  I keep seeing a very lovely embroidery design popping up on Instagram which made me very tempted to give it a try.   It's Sew Laugh Love by Leanne's House but unfortunately it's no longer available to buy as a kit anywhere, except in Australia which just so happened to be where my parents were over Christmas, visiting my sister.  Following a desperate email, and a long flight it made it's way over to the UK and straight to my craft room.  I'm really looking forward to learning a new skill and hope I can do it justice on my first attempt.   

So I'm definitely going to be busy for the next few months!  I'm excited that it's a mix of projects that I love like amigurumi, easy going pattern free projects like the granny blanket, and a completely new skill in embroidery.  What are your crafty plans for 2014?