The People Chose Lizzie*Kate

This SAL is all about what you want to see on the blog.  Each month I ask for suggestions for themes and then put them up to the members of the IHSW Group on FB to vote for their choice.  This is what they have chosen:

January - Lizzie*Kate

February - Penguins

March - Coffee

I put the poll up to decide the February theme and Penguins and Coffee were vying for first place.  On decision-day Penguins was in the lead so I made that the choice, but then Coffee fought back so I decided that would be the choice for March and save me from doing a poll over Christmas!

But back to January and Lizzie*Kate.  

"Who is this elusive Lizzie*Kate? Lizzie*Kate is a cross stitch design business that began in 1996. The creator, Linda, was bored with her job and looking for a new creative outlet. She decided to combine her favorite hobby of stitchery with her past job experience (pre-children) in graphic design. Linda was 40 years old (yikes!) and ripe for a new challenge! In about 6 months, she drew 20 designs, stitched and finished them. As she was readying to exhibit at the annual Charlotte Market in August, she had to pull together all the details to start a new business.

One important job was naming her new company! On a whim, she decided to combine the nicknames for her daughters' middle names - Sarah Elizabeth "Lizzie" and Alison Kathleen "Kate" - and Lizzie*Kate was born! She did a rough sketch of how the logo might look, and never had time to revise it. Thanks to kind stitchers around the world, the Lizzie*Kate logo is now well known!"

From the Lizzie*Kate website

I was aware of Lizzie*Kate designs but they didn't really appeal to me when I started stitching.  In fact I don't think I ever actually "bought" one of her charts.  The first time I laid hands on one was a Travelling Chart back in the early days of my blog.

Travelling Charts were very popular back then, each person stitched it and passed it on to the next person in line.  Maybe I should start one again?

This one came from Cucki in South Africa and I wanted a quirky look to it, so I coloured the aida with fabric pens and swapped all the colours:

The second design was another Travelling Pattern, from Kate's Floss Box this time:

A nice simple design until I changed the border to satin stitch and had problems counting!

The next three were all gifts:

For these two seasonal designs I decided I did not want to stitch the hills so used my trusty felt-tipped pens to colour the fabric in again.

I did buy the other two seasons but haven't stitched them yet!

Two of the Samplings

(prizes again)

and finally this one which was a gift again!

In my stash I have the Holly & Hearts Sampler (a gift again) and the other two seasonal houses.

So from my original feelings of "meh" about these designs you can see I actually rather like them and enjoy stitching them!  Thanks to all the bloggers who kept sending them my way.  As Lizzie*Kate herself would say "Life is better with stitching friends".

Now it's over to you.  All you have to do is make a post on the theme of Lizzie*Kate, 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.

Looking forward to reading them all!