Spring Welcome Wall Hanging

Happy Tuesday, everyone!  It's been a crazy couple of days for me.  My mom had a serious medical scare, so I've been in the hospital and taking care of her house the last couple of days.  That means no Tuesday Tip this week :(  Sorry!  But there will be a free pattern on Friday, yay! 

And I did manage to finally finish my spring wall hanging!  It's such a cute pattern!

Spring Welcome Wall Hanging pattern, $4 on Etsy

I have some other cool patterns in the works that hopefully won't take as long as this one did!  (And to think, I want to make the other two seasons to finish this series!  What was I thinking?)

Hope you're all having a great week so far! 

Free Friday: Valentine's Heart Bag Clip

Happy Friday, everyone!  Did you have a good week?  Mine was pretty good, actually, though I didn't get as much done as I would have liked.  I suppose none of us really do though, huh? 

One thing I definitely wanted to get done this week was a Free Friday pattern because it's been weeks since I last posted one.  Truth be told, I had this one done last week, but I was so tired that I never got around to posting it.  So here you go, your belated pattern! 

This week's pattern is a cute bag clip for Valentine's.  I like dressing up simple things, like brown paper bags.  It makes wrapping easy and inexpensive, and the clips are totally reusable! 

This pattern could be altered in lots of ways.  You could make the heart a solid color, or make it gingham, or checkered, or with flowers on it.  You could change the colors to fit any season, really.  Get creative!  And if you come up with something cool, I'd love to see your creation :)

Valentine's Heart Bag Clip

 

Skill Level:

Beginner

Materials:

• 7-count plastic canvas
• Yarns in colors listed in key
• Wooden clothespin
• Hot glue
• #16 plastic canvas needle

Instructions:

1. Cut and stitch plastic canvas according to graph.
2. Overcast around the whole heart with white yarn.
3. Use hot glue to attach pumpkin to clothespin so that the bottom of the heart is near the opening of the clothespin. ♥

Click the image above to see it larger.  You may share this pattern however you please as long as you don't alter it or claim it as your own.  You may sell items made from this pattern.  However, you may not sell this pattern.

I have another Valentine's pattern for next week, so stay tuned! 

Wordy Wednesday

So I'm sure you've all heard of Wordless Wednesday, right?  It's the idea of posting on your blog with just pictures, without words.  I've tried that in the past (not on this blog), but you know what?  I'm too wordy for that!  So instead, today's post is Wordy Wednesday! 

It's been a hectic week, but I did make some progress on my projects, and I thought you'd all like to see how they're doing!  I have a PC pattern almost done.  It's totally stitched, but I need to get around to making the pattern now, but for some reason I just feel totally blah about doing that today (which is why I took these pictures instead, lol).  Here it is:

It's a spring version of my Fall Wall Hanging for sale up at Etsy. I plan on eventually doing one for each season, but gee whiz!  These wall hangings take forever to stitch.  I've been working at this one for two weeks now, I believe.  Of course, it probably would have taken less time if I hadn't also been busy with a quilt and taking care of a sick guy.

Speaking of my quilt, it's really coming along too.  I sewed up the first block last night, and I have to say, it's going to be one weird ass quilt, lol.  It's a lot brighter and wilder than I usually make my quilts!  But my MIL gave me a bunch of fruit and veggie fabric a while back, and I love this pattern so much, I thought I'd give it a try.  I figure if nothing else, it'll make the perfect picnic quilt.

I also wanted to share my newest toys!  I decided to buy myself some books to help me with my designing since I'm still pretty new at it and I want to become really good at it.  Here they are:

The one on the left is 501 Rotary-Cut Quilt Blocks and the one on the right is The Needlepoint Book.  Yes, I know the one is a quilt book!  However, I bought it because I've always had intentions of incorporating quilt designs into my PC designs, and this book will certainly help with that.  Especially since it's specifically rotary cut blocks, the designs should translate to PC pretty easily. 

There's lots of gorgeous designs!  I'm excited to get working on those.  Plus, I'll have it on hand for my quilting too (someday I'd like to start designing for quilts too, but that's in the future somewhere).

Did you know that Plastic Canvas is actually a form of needlepoint?  Until recently, I had no idea.  As a designer, I really want to bring something new to the PC world, and I especially want to make pieces with lots of texture and interesting techniques.  So many PC designs are super simplistic, using only the continental stitch.  That's ok for a beginner, but as you progress, you want to make something more complex and interesting, but there's very few designs out there that fit that bill. 

That's where this book comes in.  Since PC is a form of needlepoint, I'm hoping I can learn to beef up my designs with what I learn.  I have to tell you, this book is fascinating!  It has well over 300 needlepoint stitches!  I spent over an hour just flipping through pages, staring wide eyed at all the new possibilities.  This is how much of the book is just stitches:

And here's a picture of some of the cool stitches in the book.

I can't wait to try some of these out!  I'll be sure to share anything I learn, too. 

So that's what I'm up to this week.  Have any of you got any interesting projects going on? 

Tuesday Tip: Wrangling Craft Cord

Happy Tuesday, everyone!  I hope you all had a good weekend.  Mine was not quite so great; hubs just got over a bad cold and I was going crazy because I hadn't been alone for well over a week.  Eeek!  (Good thing I'm not a parent, right?  Lol)  Thankfully he's fully over his cold now and back to work, and I have the whole house to myself again!

So this week's tip came to me when I was working on the Floss Card Pattern.  While I was wrapping up my embroidery floss, I had to untangle it from a bunch of my craft cord, and I thought that the floss card idea would work great for the cord. 

Of course, the cord is much thicker and comes in pretty long hanks.  It's even more unwieldy than loose embroidery floss, if you can believe that, so there's no way that it would fit on the floss card.  Instead, I decided to just wing it and make something that looked appropriately sized.

Here's a before picture of a hank of cord:

And here's the after:

Much better! 

Since I didn't use a specific pattern, I decided to make this a tip instead.  Basically what I did was I made the floss card pattern only bigger, and finished off with the tape just like I did with the floss card.  I just used scraps of plastic canvas in shapes that looked big enough.  Then when I was done, it all fit nicely into a little shoe box with my collection of embroidery floss.

Tada!  Now instead of a messy ball of knots in a dark and dusty drawer somewhere, they're neatly wound cards filed away on my crafting bookshelf. 

So how do you keep your small bits of cord or string organized?  This is the best idea I've come up with, but to be honest, before I did this all my string really was balled up in a drawer out of sight!  Which worked until I needed something, lol.

Have a great Tuesday, everyone!

My projects!

So I said before that I've been super busy lately, and I bet you're wondering what I'm busy with!  Well, here's a couple pictures to pique you're interest!

 My latest design:

The beginnings of a cool quilt:

I'm also still working on organizing  my crafts, though to be honest, I'm just waiting for a package from Ikea to get here so I can finish everything.  I can't wait to show you what I've done!

So that's all!  I'll be sure to post more pictures of my projects when I'm further along with them.

Tuesday Tip: Plastic Canvas Scraps / How I Buy Plastic Canvas

Hi everyone!  How have you been doing?  Getting through these long winter days without going crazy?  I sure hope so.  I deal with winter by keeping myself busy.  Consequently, that's why I haven't been posting a lot in my blog lately; I've been so busy with side projects that I haven't taken the time to write!  Which I understand is pretty silly.  If I'm bored, I should blog, right?  I promise I'll try to!

Today's tip is a two-fer.  Since both tips are kind of small, I decided to put them together so you get two tips for the price of one! 

My first tip is a pretty simple one.  Saving plastic canvas scraps.  Maybe this seems like a no brainer for you, but it's such an important tip that I figured I'd better mention it.  I mean, there might be someone out there who hadn't thought of this and might thank me later!

If you work with plastic canvas with any frequency, you soon realize that it can be a wasteful craft.  You take a large sheet of PC, cut out the small piece you need for your pattern, and then you're left with half a sheet of PC.  What do you do with it?  Do you throw it away, or do you save it?  If you save it, then what?  Just throw it in a pile?  That could get messy pretty quickly. 

To make my PC go further, I save most of my scraps.  I like having a wide variety of pieces because you never know what size you're going to need, and this saves you from having to cut up a new sheet.  Here's what my scraps look like.

I keep it in one of my plastic drawers.  This is wide enough to hold all but the biggest pieces, and deep enough so I can keep quite a few scraps indeed.  As you can see, I keep all kinds of scraps.  The big pieces are on top, and the smaller ones are on the bottom.

I don't keep every single scrap.  I used to, but then I realized that I actually never use the tiny scraps.  As a rough rule, I tend to only keep pieces that are the size of my palm or bigger.  It's painful, but you do have to throw some pieces away to make sorting through your scraps easier. 

I actually end up using my scraps about half of the time when I'm working with PC.  They're especially useful for magnets and coasters, but any time you're working on a small piece is a great time to poke through your scraps. 

So that was tip #1.  Like I said, probably not much of a revelation, but it's so important to me that I thought I'd better mention it.  The next tip is another way to save money, but this time it's about how I buy PC in the store.  I'm a huge penny pincher, and trust me when I say I've searched for the absolute cheapest way to buy PC, and now I want to share that with you!

For starters, I want to say that this tip will probably change with time, and it may also be different depending on where you live.  As far as I can tell, these prices are at least consistent across the USA.

I always buy my PC in bundle packs. 

I get my regular sheets (10.5x13.5 inches) at JoAnn Fabrics.  They sell packs of 12 for $5.99 regularly.  However, if you can find a 60% off coupon, which I get about once a month in the mail, you can get it for $2.40!  That ends up being about 20 cents a sheet, which is the very cheapest I've seen PC anywhere, by about half actually.  I try to stock up as much as possible.  It's sad to say, but PC isn't very popular and there's that chance that stores may stop carrying it.  I currently have about 4 unopened packages of PC, and lots of loose sheets.  I should be good for a while.

I also frequently use Ultra Stiff  (12x18 inch) PC in my designs.  The best place I've been able to find to buy this is at Walmart.  At least in my local Walmart, they carry a 3-pack for $3.47, which is about $1.15 a piece.  You could technically get it a little cheaper at JoAnn if you take in a 50% off coupon, but they only sell their utra stiff PC as single pieces, so you would need one coupon for each piece, which is kind of a pain.  So I just buy it at Walmart. 

So there you go, folks.  The cheapest way I've seen to buy PC!  Do any of you have a better source for PC?  Can you buy it in super bulk somewhere for even less?  I'd sure love to know if any of you know!  

Tip Tuesday: Wall Thread Storage

What is it about the new year that makes me (and apparently everyone else) want to start organizing our lives?  Is it the fact that we all decide we want to start the new year with a clean slate (and desk)?  We want to clean out last year's messes and swear this year will be different?  Or maybe the real answer is, that we just want to find room to put all those new things we got for Christmas!  Either way, I think we all have at least a little bit of that urge to start going through drawers and clearing out the old and getting a little more harmony in our lives.

If you follow my blog at all, you know that I've been on an organizing kick lately.  I go through this about once a year.  Last year, I spent an entire week doing nothing but organizing, ironically, my craft room.  Despite how messy and unkept it is now, it was way worse before that.  I figure if I keep doing this once a year, I'll eventually get it the way I want it!

Just a warning, the post ahead is picture heavy!