The Girl that Stitches

Diamond Painting I’ve stumbled across the craft of diamond painting, which involves sticking resin tiles/diamonds to a sticky canvas.  The tiles are available in both round and square shapes in the whole DMC colour range. This means any cross stitch chart can be turned into a diamond painting! There are kits available but the quality of the kit will vary depending on the size and amount of colours used.  In any case, it is possible to make a diamond painting using a Heaven and Earth Designs chart, which really caught my interest! Diamonds Are A Girls Best Friend… I’ve decided to jump right in and make Spirit of Flight my first diamond painting! This one was screaming “pick me” and I can really visualize it working well.  The diamonds are 2.5mm each which makes the canvas the equivalent of working on 10 count cross stitch fabric. The finished size of this piece will be about 85 by 113cm...  Just over a meter wide! Spirit of Flight by Josephine Wall: Cha...

Butterflies Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been stitching another butterfly cushion! This was the colour scheme of the first one I stitched some time ago. Original Butterfly: Monet’s Room I stitched another version of this butterfly as a gift for my Sister. The colour design of the cushion was inspired by Monet's painting "Water Lily Pond 2." My Sister has a room with a Monet inspired colour scheme, so I picked colours that would work in this room. Water Lily Pond 2 by Monet: New Butterfly; Ready to be stitched to cushion: Finished Cushion; 22 count Hardanger tented with 3 to 4 strands: Lilly Butterfly The Pattern is available on the downloads page .  The colours used in this Monet version are: Happy Stitching! xxx

Rug Progress  The t-shirt rug is now finished! Here are some work in progress photos from where the last blog left off: Previous progress; 20 rounds, about 80cm wide: After 31 rounds; about 127cm wide: After 32 rounds; about 130 cm wide The Finished Rug The completed rug ended up having 35 rounds and measuring 144 cm wide!  It’s also quite heavy!  Which is not surprising since there has got to be at least 50 or so whole t-shirts of varying sizes in there.  I did end up needing more green t-shirts for the last couple of bands as I decided to go back to green before ending on black.  There were some t-shirts left over but I did use most of the yarn I had.   The great thing about the rug is it is hand washable.  I've found it’s better to spot wash if possible because it’s really thick which means it takes ages to dry. Underlay I purchased a non-slip rug grip underlay for underneath.  Although the rug so heavy that it doesn’t tend to...

A Circular Rug I've been busily making my t-shirt rug project and can now reveal the first part of the rug!  If you have been following along with previous blogs, it will now make sense as to why I was madly cutting up so many t-shirts!  After weeks of collecting, washing and cutting shirts it was super exciting to finally get stitching!      A rough template of the colour band order followed is pictured below, traveling from right to left with some lines of yarn doing more than one band.  The estimated gauge from my test swatches was about 2 cm per round.  The plan was for the finished rug to be between 120 to 150cm wide, a size that would work well for the room it would live in.  For the rug to be halfway between this range it would need approximately 33 rounds! (To estimate the number of rounds for a given size circular rug; find the radius and divide by the stitching gauge:  So for a rug diameter of 135cm, the radius= 135cm divided by...

Farewell to 2016 After what seems like days of getting stuck in confetti stitching it's finally come to an end!  I managed to finish my 2016 Yearly Goals in time! There were two pages left to complete; one on Iris and one on The Queen of Spades. Previous progress: Current progress: Previous progress: Current progress: This year I managed to complete a total of 10 pages on my HAED's!  Thanks to everyone for all the encouragement and comments throughout 2016.  It's been fun sharing my stitching with you all.  Wishing everyone a Happy New Year and may 2017 be your best one yet! Happy Stitching xxx

Of Earth, Air, Water & Fire This week I finished the top page on the Phelan project.  The first column is now complete! Reminder of cropped version: Previous progress: Current progress: It's really tricky to capture the sparkle on camera.  It glitters more in person!  The metallic threads were not charted and have been added to the design.   Goals Update Now the Phelan pages are done I'm very very close to achieving my yearly goals!  There are still two pages left to finish for my 2016 goals.  The pages are almost there but both have a decent amount of confetti remaining, so fingers crossed they can be completed in time! Update on the T-shirt Yarn Project! After checking out how many t-shirts were used in similar projects,  I decided there was a need for more shirts!  The yarn pile has now multiplied from 29 to 51 balls! There are also some spare shirts to cut up if need be. The dark greens and blues are not displaying correctly... A...