Regular followers will be aware that for over 3 years now I have run a themed SAL on the first Saturday of each month. First we spent 26 months doing The Alphabet Club and then 12 months of the Zodiac. Now I have decided to listen to the People and post about your choice of theme. Each month I ask for suggestions on the blog and then make a poll in the IHSW Facebook Group from those suggestions.
July - Finishing
August - Monochrome
September - Bees
Finishing - the end goal and the thing we love to hate! The biggest source of procraftination - starting another project so you don't have to fully finish the previous one.
There are so many different ways to fully finish a design - from framing to pillows, from 3D fancies to flatfolds, from scrapbooking to putting it in a bag for 20 years. Most of us have a pile of finished pieces we have promised to FFO "one day". In fact Rachel, the Ten Hour Stitcher started a SAL for that very reason. You can link up with her on the 10th of every month and find out what she has inspired everyone to FFO recently.
Like most people, my first finishes were simple frames. In fact, my very first finishes went in "click" frames, no stretching or lacing needed, cut fabric to size, click the clips around the edge! My first fancier frame was this one in 1994:
The wooden frame came plain with the kit. I painted it red and mounted the stitching on the back. The design is stitched all on one piece of fabric with the gaps charted.
Compared with this Joan Elliott design from 2010 where I had to draw around the glass for each mini frame and choose the portion of the design to fit in each aperture:
I do make pillow finishes although my sewing is not my strong point! This is one of my first attempts from 2012:
That is my own design, for an exchange we did. Here's a more recent Just Nan one from 2017:
I mentioned 3D stitching which is incredibly fiddly but very rewarding. Here's my first attempt:
Drac-in-a-Box by Acorn House Designs
An adorable little cottage by the Nutmeg Company:
Just Nan Haunted Autumn Mouse in a House:
My exploding book was another fun finish:
I need to make a video of that one. It uses two series of Just Nan designs. More photos in this post here - Warning-this-post-contains-explosives
Of course, I could dedicate an entire post to my Scrapbook finishes. I discovered a love of collecting the papers and a simple way to display a lot of small finishes. I have a page on my Happy Dance blog with them all on - Scrapbook pages
Here's a favourite - Brooke's Books Belinda Witch in Venice. Old calendars make great scrapbook pages!
All my finishes can be found on my Happy Dance blog - there are over 600 of them now which is why it was so hard to just choose a few for this post! Link in the tabs at the top of the page.
Now it's over to you. All you have to do is make a post on the theme of Finishing, mention The People's Choice SAL (you can copy the picture I used at the top of this post and in my side bar) and my blog. Please link up using the URL of the actual blog post, not the home page of your blog. I look forward to seeing what you all post.
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Finally, I need your suggestions for the next poll. Any thing, no matter how obscure, weird or random will go into the poll. Keep the theme suggestions to a single word or two - so you could have Cats, or Blue, or Holidays, or Warmth etc. Really anything which could be illustrated in cross stitch.
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Finally, I need your suggestions for the next poll. Any thing, no matter how obscure, weird or random will go into the poll. Keep the theme suggestions to a single word or two - so you could have Cats, or Blue, or Holidays, or Warmth etc. Really anything which could be illustrated in cross stitch.
Looking forward to reading them all!
