Author Archives: Karen

WIPocalypse – October 2014

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I decided to join the WIPocalypse, both to motivate me to make blog posts and to keep stitching on my current WIPs. I currently have five WIPs that I am working on, and I have two really old kits that I pick up every now and then to make some progress on them.

My most recent start and the project I am actively working on is Autumn Harvest Festival from the Frosted Pumpkin Stitchery. I got to a point where it seemed like all of my projects were huge and complicated and I wanted something smaller and easier to stitch from time to time. I think these patterns are cute, and as I am not that into Halloween I liked that it was autumn themed, not Halloween themed. This is my current progress:

Autumn Harvest Festival - Progress - October 18, 2014

My next WIP is the Tree of Stitches from Bee’s Needleworks. I worked on it a lot in September, but then I got a lot of fun stuff in the mail and I wanted to work on something else. This is my current progress:

Progress 2014-10-18

My other WIPs are the three Passione Ricamo Mystery SALs. The first one was Fatum from 2012-2013. I like it a lot, except the writing on the bottom. I find the letters very dominating and I might try to remove them. I started late and got distracted when the next one came out. This is my current progress:

Fatum - Progress - October 18, 2014

The second mystery was Into the Deep from 2013. This was the first time I ever stitched on a coloured fabric and I am really liking it. I think the pattern is beautilful and I look forward to working on it again. This is my current progress:

Into the Deep - Progress - October 18, 2014

The final mystery from Passione Ricamo is the 20 Years Celebration. Again I am not sure about the writing, so I have put that off for a while to see how it looks. I like a lot of the Passione Ricamo designs and I think the design idea is pretty cool. Somehow the pattern represented in this pattern are not the ones on the top of my wishlist, so this might be the only way that I would stitch some of them. This is my current progress:

20 Years Anniversary - Progress - October 18, 2014

Finally I have one kit of Paddington Bear making cookies that I haven’t looked at in a long time. I think it is nearly finished, but it had metallic and it frustrated me at the time. Maybe I should try to get it finished soon. The other old kit is a Classic Winnie the Pooh Miniature kit from Designer Stitches of Tigger. I love the classic Pooh designs, and I have another one in my stash, but the fabric supplied is an Aida and the pattern has a lot of fractional stitches. This makes me give up after a while and find something else to stitch.

I also have some charts kitted up that I would like to start in the near future. These are Whacky Witches in Stitches and the 2014 Magical Creatures Calendar from CloudsFactory, Workshop 1 and Workshop 2 from Châtelaine Designs and the Christmas Celebration Sampler from the Frosted Pumpkin Stitchery.

I am kitting up the new mystery from Passione Ricamo, Under the Moonlight, and it will be a priority when it starts. I have all the DMC and the fabric and special materials are ordered from the Crafty Kitten. I hope they arrive in time so that I can start this when the first part comes out.

Question of the month: Are you a Halloween or Christmas stitcher?

Halloween had become quite popular here in the last few years, but most people don’t decorate unless they have a party. Because of this I think stitching for Halloween is sort of pointless. If I displayed any Halloween stitching it wouldn’t be up for more than a couple of days. That said if I find pattern I like I might stitch it just for fun.

I have stitched some objects for Christmas, but I have become really picky and I rarely find anything I want to stitch. Again, if I find something I like I would probably get it. However I don’t feel like I have to stitch for holidays any specific time of the year, so I might stitch a Christmas pattern in July if I feel like it.

Passione Ricamo M04 Mystery SAL – Under the Moonlight

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Passione Ricamo is going to have a new Mystery SAL. This time it is called “Under the Moonlight” and the fabric suggestions you get when have paid to participate seem to be coloured to look like the night sky. I really like Passione Ricamo’s “The Night” pattern, and I am hoping this is along the same lines, but most of their patterns are very lovely and the SAL is not very expensive.

You can sign up at the Passione Ricamo website for € 12,90 and you receive a document with all the materials required to stitch the pattern. The first part will be sent out on November 3, 2014 and I assume that is the end of the sign-up period as well.

 

I decided to purchase a fabric and the special materials from the Crafty Kitten where you also get a 10% discount on a fabric for the pattern. I decided to use 32 ct Jobelan in Twilight Shadows. The DMC floss I ordered from 123stitch.com

I have never managed to keep up with the previous Mystery SALs, but I have always gotten my materials late, so I am hoping to be ready to start when the first part comes out and maybe keep up with the parts.

 

Waiting for my first Châtelaine kits

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On August 18 I placed an order for two smaller Châtelaine kits from the European Cross Stitch Company. On my order, I tried to add an extra piece of fabric for another project. I got an automated reply that my order had been recieved, but I got no confirmation or price for my special request. I also did not receive the PDF charts I had ordered for a long time. As I felt that I wanted some feedback on my order I contacted the European Cross Stitch Company with some questions. I got a swift and friendly reply where Cindy told med that they don’t process orders for charts before the rest of the order is ready to send out, and that my extra piece of fabric had been added to my order.

Two things confuse me about this practice:

1. Most, if not all, Châtelaines calls for DMC threads as well as all the special materials. You can find the required materials on the Internet, but I would prefer to look at the actual chart when ordering these threads to avoid errors. As I live in one of the most expensive countries in the world I usually order materials online, and when the materials for a Châtelaine finally arrive I want to be ready to start. It takes a while for an Internet order to arrive, so I want to place it as soon as possible.

2. When I make a special request on an order I really want a confirmation that it has been received, whether it is possible to fulfill and the price, even if I don’t ask for this specifically.

The whole point of this rant was actually to say that I received my two PDFs in my inbox on September 15! I assume this means that my materials have been shipped from the European Cross Stitch Co. (no e-mail with information about this either). I didn’t want to pay for the express delivery, so I don’t expect a tracking number, but a “Your package has been shipped”-e-mail would have been nice. Anyway, I read through all the instructions carefully and tried to figure out the pattern at once. I can’t wait for the materials to arrive. Normally this takes from 1 to 3 weeks: 1 week in the USA, 1 day to cross the Atlantic and an unknown amount of time at customs. When it clears customs the package should be at my post office the next day.

Tree of Stitches – September 12, 2014

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I didn’t want to wait any longer to start this and jumped in. I had quite a bit of leftover fabric from when I bought material for the Passione Ricamo 20 Years Celebration, so I cut off a piece for the Tree of Stitches. It is a 32 ct Permin linen in white.

At the beginning of the instructions it is states that “You will need to make sure you have enough of each colour, especially if you choose variegated threads” but there is no indication of how much you will actually need. I asked on the designer’s Yahoo Group “The Stitch Specialists” about the floss usage and got some useful answers, but for the most part they were not useful. The most common was “it depends on your stitching/your thread choice etc”. I know that the amount of floss used depends on the way you stitch but all I wanted was to know if I needed to buy more than one skein for the tree’s branches. As I couldn’t get any answer on the group I redrew the whole chart into PCStitch and looked at the floss usage. Based on this I bought 1 skein each of these Waterlilies: 66 Jade, 152 Mulberry and 189 Gingersnap. I also bought 1 card of Rainbow Galleries PB52 Lighter Green. This is a floss toss of all the materials.

Tree of Stitches - Floss Toss 1

The pattern also calls for beads, but I haven’t decided what I want to use yet.

I was really excited to start, so I jumped in and started on the tree’s trunk. I have never used variegated threads before so it took me a while to get comfortable with having to finish each stitch, so progress was a bit slow, but after three evenings it was finished.

Floss used: Waterlilies 189 Gingersnap cut into 1 yard lengths. I used 4 strands from one length and 2 strands of 1/2 length. This adds up to 10 strands of a 1/2 yard lengths.

Part 1 - Trunk

Part 1 - Trunk Detail

I was so excited to have finished the trunk that I jumped right into Part 2 – Smyrna Stitch. These were not very complicated, so I finished the first branch the same evening. I used 1 strand of 1 yard of Waterlilies 66 Jade to finish this branch. I am not sure about the coverage, but I will wait and see how the tree develops.

Part 2 - Whole tree

Part 2 - Detail

I have decided to skip Part 3 French knots for the moment and continue with Part 4 – Eyelets. I have never liked french knots so I want to procrastinate, and I think the placement will be easier when the second branch is in place.

Floss organizers

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A while ago I bought a bunch of StitchBow Floss Holders from DMC when I was kitting my HAED Teddy Bear Stocking. The pattern calls for so many different colours that it required proper organization of the floss. I also bought a couple of the large plastic wallets that take 15 StitchBows. I am quite happy with the StitchBows, but I find the plastic wallets unpractical. It is difficult to put the StitchBows back in their pockets and the binder becomes too space demanding and hard to manage when it is open. I really wanted some kind of box that gave me a better overview of my stash. So I spent a couple of hours searching the Internet.

I first discovered that DMC used to make a box for StitchBow storage, but it is discontinued, so my search continued. After a while I found an online cross stitch store in South Korea that had exactly what I was looking for. The shop is called Yeidam Cross Stitch. They had plastic boxes that could take 100 StichBows each. The boxes can be seen here.

I have to admit that I was sceptical of ordering from South Korea, and the payment method was not very good. But the boxes weren’t very expensive, so I decided to take risk, and potentially eat the loss, and I ordered five boxes. That should be enough for the entire DMC line with room to spare.

It turned that I had worried needlessly and the boxes arrived in good condition. They took a while to arrive, but I believe the delay can attributed to transport and customs control.

when I first got the boxes I only had the materials for the HAED Teddy Bear Stocking and the first Passione Ricamo mystery, and I kept each kit in a seperate box.

This is a photo of my kit for the Passione Ricamo Fairy Mystery SAL 2012-2013. I removed the inside tray to make room for the bead jars, but I didn’t really need the tray for this one so it was not a problem.

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This is a photo of the thread for the HAED Teddy Bear Tree Stocking. I managed to fit all the floss in one box. It was a tight fit, but I got it all in and I find it a lot easier to use than the binder and plastic wallets.

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I have since bought more materials and I have found that I ended up using a little bit of one skein and a little bit of another one in the same color for another project, and this annoyed me as well as made it impossible to keep track of what I have. I have now put all my DMC into the boxes in numerical order. If a pattern calls for several skeins of one color over a large area, like a background, I will buy the skeins for that and keep them with the project, but for everything else I just use from the boxes. This is what they look like now.

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Yeidam also has smaller boxes, and I considered buying them for smaller projects, but for the moment I don’t see the need. I bought a DMC Gold Series StitchBow roll recently and I think it will serve my needs for transporting a project and if I want to keep a kit seperated I just use a ZipLock bag.

The only drawback of using the StitchBows is that I have not found a good way to keep leftover threads, so currently I just keep each thread in a small ZipLock with the number tag from the skein. This means that I can re-use the bags later for other threads, but it might get to chaotic and will need a revision later.

As I have recently bought my first silks I think I will use Floss-a-Way bags for those, but I have not made a definite decision yet.

New stash – August 25, 2014

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I got a package in the mail from Sew and So today. I finally caved and decided to order two kits for Châtelaines from European Cross Stitch Company, but I also really like the Boudoir Fan, which is a freebie that can be downloaded on the Châtelaine website, and decided to buy the materials for it. This is what I got in the mail today.
New-stash-2014-08-25.jpg

  • DMC 333
  • DMC 3812
  • Waterlilies 099 Cocoa
  • Waterlilies 131 Banana
  • Silk ‘n Colors 073 Green Leaves Lt
  • Silk ‘n Colors 112 Wild Violets
  • Mill Hill seed beads 02010

I have wanted to stitch a Châtelaine since I first discovered them a while back, and I bought patterns for a couple of the big mandalas when there was a sale, but I haven’t dared to start any of them yet. The main reason is that kitting one up is quite expensive even if you don’t use all the special materials. I live in Norway and the availability of special materials is quite limited, at least I have not seen any of the materials required for a Châtelaine in a shop here and I have to buy them online. DMCs are available, but if I buy online anyway I can usually get them for about half the price of what they cost in a shop here. As Norway is also outside the EU it doesn’t really matter if I buy materials from countries in the EU or the rest of the world. The most important thing to consider is whether you get over the limit of import where you have to pay VAT which is currently around $ 33,50. I really don’t mind the VAT, but you also have to pay a flat fee to the handler on top of the VAT for their processing of the package which is annoying. This means that you have to make sure that the value of your package is under the limit or far enough above the limit so that the flat fee doesn’t become a too large percentage of your of your expense. I had forgotten this when I ordered from Sew and So and I thought the package would be caught by customs, but for some reason it ended up in my mail box without any extra charge. Because of all this I decided I could just buy the whole Châtelaine kits from European Cross Stitch.

I ordered the kits for Workshop 01 – Jessica and Workshop 02 – Rice as well as the PDF-patterns. I received a confirmation e-mail, but I have not received the patterns yet, something that I am not very happy about. I understand that there might be a wait for the materials, but the patterns are electronic files and could be e-mailed at once. Anyway, when I decided to do the freebie and buy the materials for that from Sew and So I also bought the DMCs for the two Workshops and those are the two that arrived today. I tried to order a fabric from European Cross Stitch for the freebie, but I haven’t heard back yet about that either. I plenty of other stuff to stitch in the meantime, so the wait for the materials is really not a problem.

Updates with photos

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I have realized that it is a problem for me to get posts published if I take pictures with my good camera and have to upload them to my computer and then add them to a post. So I decided that I would just take photos with my phone when I want to post something. I will also take pictures with my camera, and maybe I will update them someday.

Into the Deep – update November 19, 2013

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Well, at least I have started…

I am not really a fan of stitching a full page before moving to the next page, I like to finish logical pieces or colour blocks before moving on. As I have the entire pattern for the mermaid now I can stitch whatever I want in the order I prefer. This means that I started close to the center, with the tail.

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New Passione Ricamo Mystery SAL – Into the Deep

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After the success of last year’s SAL (Stitch-a-long) Passione Ricamo has created a new SAL. This time it is in nine pieces and it is called “Into the Deep”.

You can purchase a subscription at Passione Ricamo until June 14 at 8 pm central European time (GMT +1). The price for the entire pattern is 12.90 euros. When you sign up you get a welcome message and a list of all the materials needed. The first part of the pattern will arrive on June 15.

Even though I am far from finishing last year’s SAL I signed up for this one as I would not like to miss out on a lovely pattern. I have ordered all the materials except the fabric and I am waiting for them to arrive. I joined the Facebook group of people who are going participate in the SAL, so maybe I will be more motivated to stitch more often.

PR Mystery SAL update, January 6th

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A couple of days before Christmas I finally finished gridding my fabric for the Passione Ricamo Mystery SAL. I also started stitching a little bit before I remembered to take a picture of the project before I begin. This image was taken on December 23rd.

Progress, December 23rd

The fabric is gridded and ready for the first stitches.

I have now stitched quite a lot over the holidays and I am quite happy with my progress. I have finished page 1, most of page 2 and a little bit of pages 3, 5 and 6. I have not started on the border yet, but I want to wait a little bit with that. It is more fun to see the picture emerge. There is currently only sky, but I am looking forward to starting the actual fairy.

Progress, January 6th

Progress on the fairy on January 6th.