Becca’s Cross Stitch

These are some cards I made the other night (mostly birthday cards).  I bought some new sparkly black and white stickers and I wanted to try them out, I think they look quite effective.

I’ve been busy lately with moving house and starting my new job and getting everything sorted out.  Now i’m all settled in here is an update for you.  I haven’t done that much, I am nearly half way through this page.  I’m really looking forward to getting onto the next line of pages of the pattern because that’s when things really start to get interesting.

Page 7 of my HAED, The Awakening is now finished.  The sun is sparkly but it doesn’t show up very well in the photo unfortunately.  It’s stitched using Kreinik.  The #4 braid which the pattern suggested I use turned out to be quite thick and to do a full cross using one strand of this looked too thick against the one strand of normal thread used for the rest of the design.  I’m sure the Kreinik isn’t supposed to be split into strands but I found if you are careful you can split it up into 4 strands.  So I used a two strand width to make it roughly the same width as the normal thread.  Unfortunately this then resulted in it frequently getting very tangled up and shredding fluff.  Eventually I found that using just one of the four strands was easier, but going over each cross twice to make it a double thickness.

After asking about the Kreinik on some cross stitch forums I found that some people use the blending filament which is thinner, but i’m not convinced that it would be as sparkly.  Some people also do just a half cross stitch with the Kreinik #4 braid, but having tried this I found that it didn’t look good next to the full crosses that I am doing for the rest of the piece.

Anyway, here is the picture of my progress so far.

Although this is primarily a cross stitch blog I like to show you other art and craft projects that i’m working on.  This is my latest drawing, of some lilies, drawn using coloured pencils.  Unfortunately I don’t think my camera is good enough to make the photo look like the real life drawing, but it’s the best I can do.  The real life one has brighter colours.

I’ve done some more on my leopard coloured pencil drawing.  I’m not sure if it’s finished or not, i’ll leave it for now and see what I think later.  I used prismacolor pencils on black paper.

Big changes in my life at the moment.  I’ve quit teaching and now hope to get my free time back - a life without time for stitching is no good at all!  So over the past few days i’ve managed to get the first page on the second row finished off.  It was a hard page with lots of colour changes, but the next page looks like it will be much quicker, with lots of big areas with just two or three colours.

This is not cross stitch, but a drawing of a leopard i’m working on using coloured pencils on black paper.  Hopefully i’ll get it finished soon.  I’m working on my HAED, The Awakening over half term too so i’ll show you a picture of that soon.

Work over the last few months has meant I have had very little time for cross stitching, in fact i’ve probably only picked it up ten times during the last 3 months.  However I have managed to get some done and make a start on the second row of my HAED.  Here is my progress as of today and hopefully there will be a lot more to show you soon as it is now the Christmas holidays.

Sorry I haven’t written for so long, I have literally only been able to pick up my cross stitch once since term started at the beginning of September, which is very sad.  I’ve just been so busy and tired I have little time for anything but work.  However it is half term now so I have a week to recover, and hopefully at least a little stitching time.

My Woodland Enchantress has finally been framed so I wanted to share with you what it looks like hung on the wall.  I’m really pleased with how it’s turned out and I think the colours of the frame work well.

I’ve finally finished the first row of pages of my HAED, The Awakening!  It’s now been a year since i started this project, so it’s nice that after a year i’ve completed the first row.  It’s very exciting to start the next row and start moving further down the design.  Here’s a picture for you: