Housekeeping

Well, as you can see, I've been having a bit of a change around and a tidy up. I had fun looking through all the different templates, and settled on a library. I love books. I love to read, although these days I use a kindle, there are some things a kindle just can't do for me.

Craft books and recipe books especially still need to be of the paper variety.

I have quite a few of those kind of books!

So the library it is.

Then I had a think about my sweet wee sewing machine. And decided that rather than uploading it every time I make a post, I would just tuck it into that widget up there on the left. 

I'll run with things like this for a while and see how I go.

So, onto the crafty stuff.

As I said last time, I have two crochet projects on the go. Both fairly small by my standards! LOL

You've seen this pink one before, not too long ago. To be honest, it didn't change much since then. I've added 2.5 rounds of border and still didn't decide how to finish it. So it languishes in the basket in favour of other things.

And among those other things is this wee treasure. During the big changing rooms sort out I came across a bag of wool /acrylic mix yarn that came with me from GB. Not a huge amount, just enough for a wee baby size blanket, I might even get two of them out of what is here, if I make them just big enough for tucking over a car seat or a buggy.

In a change from my usual grannys I've opted for rows of double (UK) crochet.

It's making quite a dense fabric. Hopefully it will be cosy.

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 I've also found quite a bit of time to work on the froggies.

They are all wound around the roller frame at the moment and you can't really see what I'm up to.

 So here is a peep at page one of the chart instead.

I'm over half way done with this page.

I was huffing and sighing last weekend as my magnetic strips and rulers all seemed to have lost their grip! They have been giving up for a while and I was making do, but this time, Tony was listening to my frustrations and asked what was wrong. Once I had explained (and he had examined things for him self, to ensure I wasn't being a girl and trying to stick them on the wrong way up!!)  He got busy searching and found me a whole new magnetic board set. My old one was 10 x 8 inches and I had to fold pages around it and get pretty creative trying to keep them tidy. This new one Tony found was delivered on Friday. Oh my goodness, it is nearly fat quarter size! Well, maybe not, but at 12 x 18 it is huge in comparison to the it's predecessor. I love it. Thank you Tony. xx

Staying with cross stitch.

Years ago, long before I began this blog I cross stitched a set of six Santa ornaments.

I made the mistake of stitching them too close together on the aida which caused me some issues when it came time to finishing them, between that and my amateur efforts I was never happy with them.

A couple of years ago I decided to pull them apart and see if I could improve on my earlier efforts. I found some weird and wonderful shapes. They got moved around from here to there while I researched what to do and how, and eventually they went onto the too hard basket and got put away.

I came across them in the big reshuffle and decided to have another go. More than one of them had pieces of white fabric zig zagged on in an effort to make a little more room to work.

 No standard template was going to work, so some tailoring took place and eventually each Santa had his very own pair of card mounts and a new piece of backing fabric.

 A few scraps of quilt batting, some more tweaking and snipping

 Clipping and lacing

 And eventually each Santa has a bespoke new finish.

They are still a long way from perfect, but I have to say, they do look better than they did before.

 

I'm going to add a gathered ribbon edge to them and a hanger each. 

Then I think I'll call them done. 

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On a final and very important note, did you notice that my reading list has made it's way over to the left hand side of my blog? Did you also notice an interloper? Some cuckoo in this nest of stitchy squishy, soft sewn crafty things?

My dear husband has decided to start his own blog!

I shown pictures of him before, working on his scale models or more recently his home brew!

I keep telling him he should be out there finding and commenting on other blokey blogs in order to gather a few followers and make a few friends. In the meanwhile, perhaps you'd like to take a peep, or invite your male other to look over your shoulder? 

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I'm not sure what I will find time for this week as we have two staff members off work and a third expecting another grand baby and hoping to get a few days off too! Things could get busier!! 

We'll see. 

Look what we found when we went searching for the original singer gif!