Tag: needlework

baking, craftmas, Cross-stitch and Embroidery

Home for Christmas

wittychild

Right by the [bad word, bad word] skin of my [bad word] teeth…

I decided that for Christmas, my mother needed a cross-stitched picture of three kitties, to reflect ours.  So, with little regard for how much time this might actually take, I set to work:

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It was one of my goals for the year to complete a Peter Underhill pattern, since I keep buying them but not stitching them, so this was kind of a two-birds-with-one-stone deal.

I’m quite pleased with how it came out, and so glad I switched out the 14-count white aida that came in the kit for sparkly 28-count evenweave.  I think the sparkles really add a festive touch.  It’s not washed or anything, yet; I put in the final stitches at roughly 7:45 this morning.  My mother is delighted, and is trying to decide whether she wants to frame it, make it up into a cushion cover…

I also got to carry on one of my favourite Christmas traditions: making homemade cinnamon rolls for breakfast.  I do all the prep the night before, including slicing them and placing them in the pan, then refrigerate overnight.  The next morning, they just need to be proofed a tiny bit, and then baked.

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The recipe is from Vegan Brunch by Isa Chandra Moskowitz, and couldn’t be simpler or tastier.  This alone was worth the price of the book, and the buns have come to be eagerly anticipated.  You need a bit of a sugar rush to open presents!

Merry Christmas!

Cross-stitch and Embroidery, General Sewing

Christmas in July!

wittychild

A few weeks ago, I went to the cigar store with my lunch date to pick up a top-up card for my phone (this is important).  There was no harm in looking at the magazines first, was there?  This way, if I saw anything I wanted, I could pay for it all at once instead of having to queue up again after.  I squealed when I spied the Christmas ornament preview issue of Just Cross Stitch on the shelf.  It’s a harbinger of great things to come.

“Christmas already?” he asked, taking the magazine from me and turning it over in his hands, examining it.

“Of course!” I replied cheerily.  “If you want to be finished in time for Christmas, you have to start now.”

We perused this year’s offerings, looked at the magazines a bit longer, and I paid for my cross-stitch magazine, the latest issue of Macleans, and a Wunderbar, and we left.  Without the top-up card.  But we did have a Wunderbar, which was a definite plus.

I was right, you know.  You really do have to start stitching/crafting/creating early if you want to have any semblance of sanity left by Christmas.  Hmm.  I remembered a partially finished kit bequeathed to me by my chief cross stitch consultant, who had started it before deciding “Nuts to beadwork!”.  This would be a good time to finally finish it.

A cedar I didn’t know we had in the backyard made a wonderful Christmas tree stand-in.

This is one of the many Mill Hill beaded kits I’ve amassed over the years – I had completed a “Noel” one similar to this a few years back.  It’s supposed to be a poinsettia, although to me it looks more like a bold, Eastern European geometric design.  Also, I’m starting to think there could be a real market for partially-finished kits – with most of the cross stitch finished, this project just flew by as I added the beads and sewed it together.

So there we have it: my second Christmas ornament of 2012.  Hey, if Hallmark thinks it’s time, that’s a good enough reason for me.

baking, Cross-stitch and Embroidery

Happy Mother’s Day!

wittychild

This year has been a far cry from last year’s adding French knots and framing on Sunday morning.  For once, I actually came prepared for Mother’s Day.

Besides the towel that I posted last weekend, I stitched up a little card for Mumsie:

It was a free kit that came with a recent issue of Cross Stitcher magazine.  The kit included googly eyes that looked freaky-deaky (the mama koala looked merely surprised; the baby looked like a strung-out Keane kid), so I added French knots to give a somewhat more natural look.

And you can’t have Mother’s Day without dessert, can you?

This is a variation on the raw strawberry cheesecake from The Post Punk Kitchen.  I made the filling as per the recipe, but used the vanilla cookie crumb crust from Vegan Pie in the Sky instead.  I’m not normally a cheesecake fan, but this wasn’t bad – light and mousse-ish, with a nice strawberry flavour.

The cake, incidentally, made a lovely finish to our breakfast of cocoa-Kahlua pancakes from Hearty Vegan Meals for Monster Appetites.  Dense and chewy, they were like eating brownies for breakfast.  Yum!

Happy Mother’s Day, everyone!

baking, Cross-stitch and Embroidery

So Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny walk into a bar…

wittychild

Wait.  What?

Okay, so I’m not insanely early with this, I swear.  Just kinda, sorta four months late.  I think my inner monologue started something like this (perhaps abridged for the sake of time and space): “Oh, boy, I love doing Mill Hill beaded kits.  They’re so quick and cute, and if I start stitching now I’ll have this finished in plenty of time for Christmas…All right, now that I’ve got the stitching finished, all that’s left is to add the beads.  Ooh, they’ll twinkle nicely when this is hanging on the Christmas tree….Oh, well [bad word]!  There’s a bead stuck on my needle!  Hmm, maybe if I try pushing it back off the way it came…nope…”

One of the red beads got stuck (as in, super-stuck) on my beading needle.  Right over the eye.  I could neither slide it over the eye and down to its rightful place on the ornament nor slide it back off.  Considering that at this point I had already completed most of the beading and had, oh, three red beads to go, I was considerably unimpressed by this development.  So I calmly and rationally did what any psychologically normal person would do: stuffed the entire works into a drawer to be ignored until some to-be-determined point in the future when I felt like dealing with it.

A few weeks ago, I happened to bitterly mumble something about “that [bad word] bead”, to which my mom replied, “Why don’t you just take a pair of pliers and crush it?  You do have extras, right?”  Genius!  So, yesterday I took a pair of pliers and crushed the sodding little thing to bits, whereupon I cheerfully resumed my otherwise pleasant little project.  Here it is, with one of my mom’s potted plant-like things standing in for a Christmas tree.  Hey, foliage is foliage:

It’s called “Kitty’s Gift”, and I can see now that I need to trim the backing paper on it…but I’ve still got eight months or so.  She looks rather like my youngest cat, too.

Gratuitous cat shot:

(Yes, the cat, I got dressed up in time for Christmas.  The tree, not so much.)

Also on my list of Easter weekend homemakery, I made a pie from scratch for the first time.  Well, the crust is from scratch, at least.  I didn’t want to go to all the trouble of doing a scratch filling only to find out that the crust was going to be inedible, but…next time!  I used the Buttery Double Crust recipe from Vegan Pie in the Sky by Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero, and dumped a can of peach-passionfruit filling in between.  The edge of the crust turned out a little lumpy and imperfect, but I’m still satisfied for a first attempt:

My Pennsylvania RR Peach Passionfruit Pie.  One of the pies in the book shows a crust with little stars cut out; I happened to have a small locomotive cookie cutter handy so used that instead.

I could use more four-day weekends.  I get so much more done around the house than I do at work.  🙂

baking, Cross-stitch and Embroidery

Paws up for birthday cake!

wittychild

What is it with Margaret Sherry and cute cat designs?  While flipping through a back issue of Cross Stitcher magazine on New Year’s Eve (is that a debaucherous evening or what?), I found the perfect design to turn into a card for my mom’s birthday.  While the red velvet pancakes were charring cooking, she opened a rather unassuming white envelope to find this staring back at her:

I used 18-count fabric instead of 14 as called for by the magazine to get it to fit in the card, and used random colours that looked close enough to those on the model – perfect way to use what I had laying around.  I love the concerned look on his face, and promised to use fewer candles on her birthday cake – if only by one.

(Please excuse the “arty” shot.)

I don’t think the cake could have been any simpler to make: a double batch of the basic chocolate cupcakes from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World, divided between two round layer pans, topped with a coffee-and-Kahlua’ed version of the chocolate buttercream frosting from the same.  Because I had serious doubts about my ability to wield a tube of decorating gel, I had the foresight to trace the words onto the top using a toothpick, and then follow the lines.  Hey, it may not be terribly skillful, but it worked.

And now that it’s all over, I get to breathe easy again, at least until Mother’s Day.

craftmas, Cross-stitch and Embroidery

Take me right back to the track, Jack

wittychild

My dad likes trains.  (Remember the ornament I made him last Christmas?)  He doesn’t try to fit them in his mouth like Sheldon Cooper, true, but then, he tends to display more common sense.  Anyway, I had it in my head that he needed a new shirt with some nifty railway logo stitched on the pocket, and I eventually decided on a little red caboose designed by Jan Altizer – though apparently this design is only available on the CD, and not individually.  Bummer.

I was originally looking for a denim shirt to deface….uh, I mean, enhance…but when I saw this one, vaguely reminiscent of an engineer’s hat, I knew I had found my blank canvas.

I swear it’s not that psychedelic in real life.  Methinks that fine striping, drapey fabric, and camera flashes don’t mix as nicely as I’d like them to.

That’s a little more true-to-life (look at the shirt, not the pocket).

I took the pocket off the shirt to stitch, then, using waste canvas and a sharp embroidery needle, I managed to get my design on almost straight and centered, before reattaching the pocket.

Thank heavens it fits.  There’s no way I could return it to the store now.

craftmas, Cross-stitch and Embroidery

Nice? No, naughty!

wittychild

I’m alive!  Frustrated with mankind, mind you, but alive nonetheless.  So what have I been up to in my [checks calendar] nearly two-month hiatus?  Well…November was mostly occupied acquiring this:

Go me!  Novel #8!  However – November was not a great month for crafting, and then boom, December rears its Christmas-baking-social-function-shop-and-wrap-and-sign-cards head.  Sorry; I’m attempting to rationalize here.  And I actually was able to craft one Christmas gift, although I wrapped it before I took a picture.  That will be forthcoming.  In the meantime, I have this:

It’s one of those lovely Mill Hill beaded kits, but my  goodness, was there ever a lot of white stitching!  I have the accompanying “Nice” kit in my stash, too, but may tackle that next year.  (Being naughty is more fun than being nice anyway, right?  Right!)  I backed the design with silver paper after I cut away the excess perforated paper, and presto!  Instant ornament!

For those who are curious, my new favourite holiday memory was formed just today: crowded in the workplace lunchroom with roughly 2/3 of the office, listening to one of our inspectors play his guitar and sing, and having an office sing-along to “Last Kiss”.  I wish I were making this up.

Merry Christmas, everyone!

Cross-stitch and Embroidery, General Sewing

She’s got the moon in her eye

wittychild

When I first found this pattern, I was abruptly reminded of driving to the grocery store with my mother, my cousin and I sitting in the backseat, singing along with the golden oldies on the radio.  When the Eagles came on, my cousin went right on singing, labouring under the delusion that the woman they were singing about was itchy, not witchy, and then interrupted herself to wonder aloud just why she was so itchy in the first place.  (The unspoken consensus in the backseat seemed to be VD, although this is an archaic term that we didn’t actually know back then.) From the front seat, my mother pointed out that the woman was in fact witchy, not itchy, and this put rather a kibosh on our impromptu concert.

After completing “Scaredy Cats” from the Just Cross Stitch Halloween issue, I tackled “Witchy Kitty” by Brittercup Designs, and then turned it into a cute l’il pillow ornament.

I used plain old DMC threads instead of the fancy-pants overdyed ones recommended in the instructions, but I think it looks just as good.  The one thing I’m particularly proud of is using Kreinik glow-in-the-dark fine braid to do her potion; it makes the piece really pop.  I fashioned a corded hanger using the same colours I used in the design, and then….

….I backed it with some wicked cool fabric with glow-in-the-dark kitteh eyes on it before stuffing it.  I now have the better part of .3 metres of that stuff in my stash, and I’m going to have to find a project for the rest of it.

Happy Halloween!

(And now the Christmas stitching begins…!)

Cross-stitch and Embroidery

It’s ghoulicious!

wittychild

According to the editor of Just Cross Stitch magazine, Halloween is the second most popular occasion to stitch for.  I don’t know whether the sample size for this pronouncement includes only readers of this particular publication, or stitchers in general, but that still can’t dissuade me from devouring the annual Halloween ornament issue.  My mother decided she liked “Scaredy Cats” by Val’s Stuff, so I stitched it for her:

I did not have 30-count Peoria Purple in my stash as prescribed in the magazine, but lo, 14-count Lavender Whisper aida still lends a bit of colour.  I layered the finished piece on top of two pieces of stiff, sparkly felt, and slipped a loop of black ribbon in between the black and purple felt to make a hanger.  I also tweaked the “a”s and the “s” in “cats” to make them slightly less blocky, but that was just a personal choice.

It now hangs in the living room, teasing the living and breathing cats in the house to no end.

Cross-stitch and Embroidery

Little Bundle (of joy, one assumes)

wittychild

Lo, the much-hyped birth announcement has been completed – and less than two months after the actual birth.  Go me!

It’s an Anchor kit, designed by Margaret Sherry (love her stuff!) called “Little Bundle”.  Much like the lovey-dovey Solo the Cat cross-stitch in the last post, this one is full of backstitch that starts and ends at funny places, and would have been easier on evenweave.  Despite that, I’m quite pleased with how it turned out; it really was an enjoyable stitch despite the vast areas of green and white.

Please excuse the rather dreary appearance; this is what happens when one waits until natural daylight is gone to take a picture.  Rest assured, the fabric and the diaper are white…ohhh, so much white…

It has yet to be washed and framed, but I’ll be holding off on that for just a little while.  When you hear the neighbours having a shouted conversation across the street: “Hey, Bill, how’s your water over there?”  “Brown!  Yours?”  “Yep!”, the prudent thing to do seems to be to wait for the municipal waterworks department to finish their water main repairs before attempting to soak what will hopefully be an heirloom piece.

After all that crazy backstitch, working on a perforated-paper ornament kit feels like some sort of dream…