Cushions and Cards

I may not have posted much of late, but I have been busy!  First of all I finished up the Ring of Roses scatter cushion cover by putting the zip in.  Here it is being modelled by one of our own cushions.

Then I moved on to the giraffe cushion cover.  The patchwork went relatively well, but is still a bit uneven.  This was the front when initially put together - showing off some wonders in uneven patching!!

Frankly, I prefer the back and wouldn't be at all surprised (or upset) if the recipient decided to display it this way around!

In the end I managed to find a way to improve the look of the front - put some trim around the main picture and extend it a little so as to cover over the worst of the bad joins.  It's come out OK, but it isn't exactly a masterpiece.  Mercifully, the disabled girl I'm giving it to has rotten eyesight, so she won't see it's many imperfections!!!

Then it was onto the next project - a cross stitched wedding card for a couple who are marrying on 31st of this month.  They're having tea and cakes as a simple reception afterwards, so I thought this display of colourful cupcakes was in keeping with the occasion.  It may be a simple and fairly small design, but just look at all the colours I needed!

This shows the cross stitching itself finished and the colours out for the outlining.  I decided not to use the prescribed dark grey for it, but to chose a darker shade of each colour family used for the icing (I tried to make every single cake a different colour and almost succeeded too!) and a brown shade for the cake bottoms.  The Kreinik is for the cake stand.

I think it turned out quite well, don't you?

Here are two books I borrowed from the library last week.  The hardanger one is mostly stuff I already know, but there are one or two ideas in there that I haven't come across before, including using beads in filling stitches.

Also, how about these for hardanger cards?  Creative, or what!  It made me feel that there was a great deal more to be done with a simple piece of hardanger than just to mount it in an aperture card.  I got some white card blanks yesterday to try painting up as three of these seem to have been.

I was also inspired by the cross stitch cards book.  Again, I've discovered that there's so much more that you can do with a small cross stitch than just bung it in an aperture card, so inspired by some of the designs in the book and using the technique explained there (putting bondaweb on the back of the Aida to 'stabilise' it, but not needing to bond the second side of it to anything - just cut out the shape, peel off the backing and then attach to your card), I made this with the 'cat in a basket' design I finished off a few months ago.

The cross stitched piece was attached using those glue pads you get for decoupage types of crafts and thus gives a bit of a raised look.  Of course, you can do it flat as well.

It feels good to have got a few projects finally completed and also to have some new and innovative ideas for fairly simple techniques.  I can develop quite a bit just with these counted thread pieces and am even considering trying to sell some of the hardanger ones, once I get something impressive stitched up.

What's next?  Finishing up the other WIPs, I hope!  I'm having a really good deck clear at the moment, trying to get long neglected tasks done and free my mind of all that clutter.  Next sewing machine job will be making some alterations and then I can get down to my camera case that I've been planning for over 3 years now....

Text and images © Elizabeth Braun 2012