July Smalls SAL

The Smalls SAL is hosted by Mary's Thread

For this SAL I am showing the monthly project for the Christmas Ornie Blog. I am choosing from the back issues of the Just Cross Stitch Ornament Specials.  This month the issue was from 2006 and I chose The Sweetheart Tree Christmas Joy Bellpull which is the companion to the 2007 design I stitched for March's choice.

stitched on 32 count linen

It was a quick stitch so I fully finished it straight away:

The next item for my "smalls" SAL is always my spooky conversion of Lavendar & Lace's Enchanted Alphabet.  This month I added a trio of froggies taken from a Just Nan design.

stitched on 32 count Murano Tiger Lily from Sparklies

Staying with Just Nan I had a number of successes this month.  First I finished the second side of the Butterfly Needlebook:

Then I added the beads and my initials to the first side:

And now I have them both finished.  Question is - do I make a needlebook which won't get used or do I scrapbook?

stitched on hand-dyed 28 count evenweave

Having finished those two I moved on to the next one in line, Spring Fantasy.  Very small and quickly finished!

stitched on 28 count pink evenweave

This one will be scrapbooked with some more of the butterfly stickers I used last time.

I did start another one (Butterfly Welcome) but haven't photographed it yet!

Finally, haven't shown any rocks for a while so here are two I made as End-of-Year gifts for the Small Boy's teachers:

  

July Gifted Gorgeousness Link-up Post

Welcome to the July Gifted Gorgeousness link-up.  The link-up date continues to be the 15th and I will keep the link-up open until the end of each month so you have plenty of time if you are late posting.

The format remains exactly the same, there is a list of rules on the main sign-up page if you want to check what is required but basically anything connected to the word "gift" is allowed, whether it was a gift TO you or is a gift FROM you.

My main project for Gifted Gorgeousness has been my Discworld Mappe by Lyndisfarne Designs, which will be a gift for my son.  This is where I left off last GG post:

This is where it was at the end of June:

Here is the portion I have been working on this week:

Here's where I am today:

I am currently filling in swathes of cream which make up the Hubland Steppes, home to the Horse People:-

A nomadic barbarian tribe who live up near the Hublands. As their name suggests they are very fond of horses. They fight on them, ride them, and it is said are ‘born in the saddle’ though few women would appreciate this as a birthing position.

In their tents, made from horse hide, they eat horse sausages, and drink what is hopefully beer, and burn horse dung on their fires as fuel. Rincewind remarked that they ‘had a lot to learn about ventilation, starting with what the word meant’.

They are friends with Cohen the Barbarian and give him and his companions shelter in The Colour of Magic.

They had a necromancer as their wise woman and spiritual leader, who appeared surprisingly adept at her craft. She used the Caroc Cards to determine where Twoflower had gone, and then sent Rincewind to the house of Death to bring back his soul.

Source: L-Space


Other gifted projects include my Butterfly Needlebook by Just Nan which is stitched on gifted fabric:

stitched on 28 count hand-dyed pink evenweave

stitched on hand-dyed 28 count pink evenweave

The plan is to photocopy the finished piece to make a notebook cover for a friend and then stitch my initials in the space and scrapbook it.

Now it is your turn to show us your Gifted Gorgeousness for the month.  Please use your name or your blog name in the field and NOT the words "July Update" so I can easily see who has linked up this month.  And link to the actual post, not just your blog.  It is easier if you copy and paste the link, rather than typing freehand.

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Finally, I took part in a Craftivist Training Day ready for a workshop in September as part of the Heritage Open Days.  This year the theme is Dare to Dream and there is lots more information here:

Heritage Open Days - Dare to Dream

Sarah Corbett of the Craftivist Collective has designed a kit to make a hand embroidered Dream Cloud with the message of your choice.  The workshop today had a wide variety of people from activists with Extinction Rebellion to representatives from the Heritage Open Days; crafters and textile artists to people who had barely threaded a needle before.  We will be helping out or organising the workshops in September, so stay tuned for more posts about this.

This is the kit we all got:

This is the lovely Sarah with the ribbon she gifted to us all:

And this is my craftivism on the go - the train home!

July TUSAL

And now it's TUSAL time, the Totally Useless SAL where we all show our ORTS and link-up on Daffycat's blog (if she makes a post, she's gone very quiet again).

Here is my TUSAL jar with my current projects:

On the left we have the two sides of the Just Nan Butterfly Needlebook:

stitched on 28 count pink evenweave

The side on the left is all finished except for the beads and my initials.  The side on the right needs the pink shades adding.

 The other design is my Christmas Ornament for the month.  For July we can choose any design from the 2006 issue of Just Cross Stitch Ornament Special.  I went for this one from The Sweetheart Tree to co-ordinate with their Noel Christmas Noel Bellpull.  This is Christmas Joy Bellpull: 

stitched on 32 count linen

What I did not realise is that it is simply a smaller version of the Noel ornament!  Or rather, Noel is a larger version of Joy, as Joy was published first.  The designer clearly ran out of time for a new design and thought "I can duplicate the leaves, add an eyelet and have a new ornament"!

I stitched both of them using a DMC conversion and the same beads from my stash.  I will finish Joy in the same way as Noel.

Rachel, the Ten Hour Stitcher made a blog post recently about the DUCJC 2016 which sparked my interest.  Debbie the SoCal Stitcher was a blogger who started the whole Crazy January Challenge with 15/31 starts every January.  Sadly she passed away and was sorely missed by her blogging friends.  I took part in the DUCJC in 2015 (Debbie's Ultimate Crazy January Challenge) which I decided meant working on 31 projects in January, some WIPs, some new starts.

Rachel got me wondering how many were ever finished.  As luck would have (or serendipity?) 13th July is Debbie's Birthday.  So I thought it would be good to make a post about my own 2015 challenge and find out how many got completed.  Here's a chance for you to join in - either show your own DUCJC pieces or take a guess how many out of my 31 projects got finished!  Here's the collage of the projects I worked on that year:

Finally, there will be a Summer Blog Hop this year.  We will have an International Theme for the Postcards this year.  Each person emails me a photo of something they have stitched on an International theme which is suitable to send to a fellow stitcher along with a short message of the kind you write on a postcard.  I will forward the photo to another participant who shows it on their blog.  The photo can be anything which fits the International theme, let's see which countries we visit this Summer.  If you'd like to take part then leave a comment or send me an email.

The Hop will run over the whole of the Summer with a few cards going out each week.  Final deadline will be the end of August, just in time for Back to School!

June Smalls SAL

The Smalls SAL is hosted by Mary's Thread

For this SAL I am showing the monthly project for the Christmas Ornie Blog. I am choosing from the back issues of the Just Cross Stitch Ornament Specials. This month we could chose any ornament from any issue from 2001 to 2010.  I went for a Just Nan design from 2002; A Little Joy.

stitched on 28 count Platinum linen

The fabric next to it will be the backing fabric for the ornament finish.  The original was charted so the small design in the centre was stitched over 1 on a separate piece of fabric and then put into a tiny frame attached the main design.  But as I don't have a tiny frame, I stitched it direct on the fabric and added a little gold backstitched frame around it.

This was a lovely design to stitch, some speciality stitches, some metallics and some beads as well as the tiny over one scene in the centre.

The other regular project for the SAL is my spooky conversion of Lavender & Lace's Enchanted Alphabet.  I finished the letters a while back and now I am adding various spooky motifs each month.  This month I added some little ghosts:

I am also stitching a Just Nan small each month.  This is side 1 of Butterfly Needlebook.  I am calling this a finish although there are some initials to be added in the centre of the motif.  I want to complete both sides before I add them.

stitched on 28 count hand-dyed pink linen

This is side 2 of the Needlebook:

Finally, a less pleasant subject - Spam.  I have had a rash of spam comments just lately.  Fortunately they have not appeared on my blog as I moderate comments, so for those of you who do not moderate - check your comments daily to delete them.  Most are quite obviously spam although there was one that seemed to be a real person "Millie", until you followed their link and they were not!

June Gifted Gorgeousness Link-up Post

Welcome to the June Gifted Gorgeousness link-up.  The link-up date continues to be the 15th and I will keep the link-up open until the end of each month so you have plenty of time if you are late posting.

The format remains exactly the same, there is a list of rules on the main sign-up page if you want to check what is required but basically anything connected to the word "gift" is allowed, whether it was a gift TO you or is a gift FROM you.

My main project for Gifted Gorgeousness has been my Discworld Mappe by Lyndisfarne Designs, which will be a gift for my son.  This is where I left off last GG post:

This is where it was at the end of May:

Here is the portion I have been working on this week:

Turnwise Ocean
Like other worlds, even nearly spherical ones, the Discworld has only one ocean.  Like ours, however, it is divided into arbitrary bits for easy reference.  Also like ours, these arbitrary bits are defined according to the viewpoint of those drawing the maps.  The three contiguous continents (arbitrarily defined themselves) divide the ocean into two main areas, and that attached to the Circle Sea (the people drawing the maps) is further divided into the Rim Ocean, the area nearest them, and the Turnwise Ocean. The far side of the Disc is known as the Widdershins Ocean.

The Turnwise Ocean extends from about Hergen and the Brown Islands to the Counterweight Continent. It includes the island of Mithos and the be Trobi Islands, with Gonim, Whale Bay and Ecalpon hubwards.

Trob is an island mentioned in The Colour of Magic whose sailors sometimes visit the Counterweight Continent. The beTrobi people are fairly simple and speak in metaphors. With words like Awayawa, Orohai and Raruaruaha, beTrobi seems to be linguistically very similar to the South Sea Islands of Roundworld, also known as Polynesia.

Brown Islands - The natives speak a complex language and once worshipped an inn-sewer-ants polly-sea that fell from a high thermal into a bush from the smoking remains of Ankh-Morpork in The Colour of Magic. The strange (is anything strange when dealing with gods?) thing is that they have received surplus rainfall and a rich crop. The research team sent from Unseen University reported that "it only goes to show".

Source:L-Space

Here's where I am today:

Other gifted projects include my Butterfly Needlebook by Just Nan which is stitched on gifted fabric:

stitched on hand-dyed 28 count pink evenweave

Now it is your turn to show us your Gifted Gorgeousness for the month.  Please use your name or your blog name in the field and NOT the words "June Update" so I can easily see who has linked up this month.  And link to the actual post, not just your blog.  It is easier if you copy and paste the link, rather than typing freehand.

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Finally, there will be a Summer Blog Hop this year.  We will have an International Theme for the Postcards this year.  Each person emails me a photo of something they have stitched on an International theme which is suitable to send to a fellow stitcher along with a short message of the kind you write on a postcard.  I will forward the photo to another participant who shows it on their blog.  The photo can be anything which fits the International theme, let's see which countries we visit this Summer.  If you'd like to take part then leave a comment or send me an email.

A couple of people have asked "what do you mean by "International"?"

To which I replied "Use your imagination!  If you don't have something which represents a country or an area of the world, how about a mode of transport?  Or something designed by an international designer?  Or gifted by an international friend?  Or stitched on French Navy fabric? LOL!!"

The Hop will run over the whole of the Summer with a few cards going out each week.  Final deadline will be the end of August, just in time for Back to School!

June TUSAL

And now it's TUSAL time, the Totally Useless SAL where we all show our ORTS and link-up on Daffycat's blog (if she makes a post, she's gone very quiet again).

Here is my TUSAL jar with my current projects:

On the left we have Just Nan's Butterfly Needlebook:

stitched on 28 count pink evenweave

This is a lovely thick hand-dyed fabric which was a gift from Mouse.  However, it's not quite an evenweave.  It's actually 29 count in one direction and 31 in the other, so the "squares" are not quite square.  But the way I have oriented the central motif means it will still look square.  That was lucky!

The other project is also a Just Nan.  This is A Little Joy from Just Cross Stitch 2002 for the Christmas Ornament Blog:

stitched on 28 count Platinum linen.

This fabric is a total contrast as it is very loosely woven.  The original design called for the central motif to be stitched over one on a separate piece of fabric and inserted into a tiny frame charm then attached to the main piece.  Which would have looked lovely if the tiny frame charm was still available.  So I'm just stitching it over one right onto the main design.

Finally, there will be a Summer Blog Hop this year.  We will have an International Theme for the Postcards this year.  Each person emails me a photo of something they have stitched on an International theme which is suitable to send to a fellow stitcher along with a short message of the kind you write on a postcard.  I will forward the photo to another participant who shows it on their blog.  The photo can be anything which fits the International theme, let's see which countries we visit this Summer.  If you'd like to take part then leave a comment or send me an email.

The Hop will run over the whole of the Summer with a few cards going out each week.  Final deadline will be the end of August, just in time for Back to School!

May Smalls SAL

The Smalls SAL is hosted by Mary's Thread

For this SAL I am showing the monthly project for the Christmas Ornie Blog. I am choosing from the back issues of the Just Cross Stitch Ornament Specials. This month we could chose any ornament from the 2001 issue.  Owing to a slight mishap with the years last month, I stitched the 2001 Dragon Dreams design in April, so I'm stitched the 2002 in May instead.  No-one will notice if you don't tell them!

stitched on 32 count green linen

The words originally read "Peace on Earth" but when I was stitching I kept singing "Peace and Harmony" which all parents of young children will know is a song sung by Madame Gazelle in Peppa Pig!

My Hallowe'en "small" is to add some small details to my spooky conversion of Lavender & Lace's Enchanted Alphabet.  This month I added pumpkins:

stitched on 32 count Murano in Tiger Lily by Sparklies

I had one finish for my Just Nan-a-thon, this one took a lot longer than most of them but it is done now, ready to be scrapbooked:

Just Nan -Butterfly Lace

stitched on 32 count Lavender Evenweave

Once this one was finished I moved on to the next one in line; Butterfly Needlebook.  I decided to stitch the whole turquoise border on both parts of the design first:

stitched on 28 count hand-dyed pink linen

And each day I stitched one length on one of the 32 designs started for Stitch Maynia last year.  Here are the last 7 designs:

Finally, I'll be back later with my Pie and Stitch from Stash post!!