A Garden of Stitches

I finished the last daffodil last night! I set myself a goal to finish all four before the month was over, and I pushed on and managed to beat my goal! :)

I have to wash my fabrics today for the quilt, and then I'll start planning it out and cutting the pieces. Hopefully my daughter will cooperate and give me the chance to get some work done. I think I'm going to have to bring the sewing machine out into the living room, though.

Three Blooms

So I have three of the flowers done. This time, I reversed the stem and leaves and kept the blossom facing the same way. I have one more daffodil to go, which I'm reversing entirely. I've got a little big already done on it, but thought I should post this tulip for now. :)

Tulip

Yay! Done with the first tulip! I was actually completely done the day before yesterday, but ran out of one of the colors in the stem. I had seven squares left to do and had to stop. That was really frustrating!

I don't know how I miscalculated the size of the fabric; I'm only going to be able to do four flowers total if I want to be able to cut them and have decent sized squares to work with. I just eyeballed it, though, so I guess that's how. I decided to flip the pattern for the second daffodil, and for the second tulip I'm going to flip the stem and leaves, but leave the petals the same direction. I have the quilt planned out in my head, I just need to decide on the actual fabric, finish my cross stitch and then get started. I'm excited for this project, I'd like to have it done by the end of July. I think that's pretty reasonable.

Daffodil

My good friend Jen kitted this up for me. There's an accompanying tulip that I'm working on next, ideally I'll finish three of each flower, and then I want to try to make it into a small quilt.

The chart didn't call for any backstitching on the stem and leaf, and I tried a little bit in a color I picked out, but I could barely tell it was there, so I didn't backstitch it. Maybe I'll see how all the flowers look when I'm done and go back if necessary, but I'm pretty happy with the way it looks right now. :)

Home Is Where The Heart Is

This is my second finished cross stitch piece. It's a stamped cross stitch kit and I substituted colonial knots for the french knots it called for. It worked like a charm and was much easier than the french knots. I don't think I like the stamped cross stitch as much as counted cross stitch, though, it seems less accurate and more messy to me. My mother in law disagrees, though, and actually prefers stamped. She also does beautiful chicken scratch and they come out looking like lace. Just beautiful! So here's my new finished piece:

First Attempt at Cross-Stitching

I had the notion to try something new since I've been so unmotivated to work on my latest quilt for months, and I was inspired by my friend Jen to try cross-stitching. I got this little kit based on Mary Engelbreit art and thought it was so cute. I've been working on it for quite a while now, maybe two weeks. The photo below is actually of my second attempt because I had to scrap my first attempt due to my apparent inability to read directions. Ha. It was a comedy of errors; first - I didn't know I was supposed to divide the threads up, so I was using a whole group of whatever it is, nine threads or something like that to do each stitch (which actually resulted in a look I think I like better for the letters - it's more solid - but still wrong.) I also didn't divide the colors so I stitched a rather large section in "rust" that should have been "dark orange". I finally scrapped the project and just started over. It was so much easier to divide and label all the different thread colors first, because then - even if I labeled them incorrectly - I was being consistent with my mistake, and also because at 11:30 at night, light pink, light blue and white all started to look REALLY similar.

Anyway, now I'm at a loss as to what to do with this finished piece. With quilting you get a nice quilt to put on a bed, or over the couch when you're done. With sewing aprons, you get an apron. I'm not quite sure what to do with this one, but I'm thinking maybe I'll frame it and put it up somewhere. Even if it's not perfect, I'm really proud of all the work I put into it.

I am, however, a little disappointed with some of the built-in design elements. I didn't do the french knots it suggested because I wasn't really happy with the rust colored stitching it directed me to do over the bonnet. I felt like it just made it look so busy, and the french knots would just add to that chaos. I'm actually thinking about taking the rust bonnet stitches out. If I ever do another one with letters in it, I think I may use more strands of thread, also, because I'd like the letters to be more solid.