Hockey Fan Snowman Wearing Canuck Team Colours Cross Stitch Chart

Time for some shameless self-promotion. In between using the Macstitch program for converting Victorian crochet patterns into colour, I've been actually doing some designing of my own on the side. The Canucks fan came about after I had a reconnection with a friend of mine from college (Hi Jane!), who just so happens to love cross stitching, and has an obsession with snowmen. So I came up with a little something for her & Canucks fans everywhere:

Available as a PDF file that is sent to your email
$3.00

It was designed to be worked on an 8" x 8" piece of 16 count fabric. There are 15 colors of thread (chart tells approximate length of each thread needed to complete project), and has full cross stitches and back stitches. The chart is in 8 st/inch for reading. The pattern assumes that you already know how to read a counted cross stitch chart.

You will receive a PDF file of the cross stitch chart within 24 hours of paying, not a physical paper chart or the finished item. I am able to make the chart in different st/inch if you want me to. If you feel uncomfortable buying directly off of my blog, I also carry the pattern on Etsy.

You'll note that I don't have the whale logo though, as I can't have that on there without having a license to do so. Hope you enjoy!

Cruel Yarn Store

Yarnia is by far the cruelest yarn shop on the planet.

They have the most delicious looking yarns - the secret being that they combine them to you liking right in their store! A good reason to make a trip out to Oregon :) But if you live far away in another country, like I do, then you can't do this . However, they do have some luscious pre-made cones available on their online store:

Now my poor children will be crying that all they have is beautiful clothing to wear, and no food to eat this winter. Curse you Yarnia, for forcing me to blow our grocery budget!

All kidding aside though, I think the concept is great, but like all ideas of sheer genius, it may be way ahead of it's time. Only time will tell, but I sure hope it takes off, and that a similar yarn store can be found near me soon.

Re-Interpreting Old Crochet Designs

I love vintage needlework patterns, and often scour used book stores, thrift shops & the internet for them. An ongoing project I've had for the past 1.5 yrs is going through pattern books that have entered the public domain & digitally remastering the patterns. I used to just scan the books in directly, but when they are so very old, there's so much work to be done afterwords to clean up the black & white illustrations and make the text readable that it sometimes seems hardly worth it. I wanted to see those old patterns in color!

So my brain slowly formed an idea. Why not use my cross stitch software (Macstitch) to interpret (or rather, re-interpret) some of those old patterns? I really don't know why it took me so long to come to this idea - as I've used this software for my own designs for over 3 yrs now. Better late than never, I guess! Anyway, the results so far have been fantastic:

This sample was derived from a 1890's crochet pattern book. For choosing the colours, I just went with the colour descriptions that were in the book and what I could find in my own research online as to what those colours would be like. I certainly don't know if the colouring is authentic to the time period, but I still liked the overall effect. I think this would look lovely as an afghan done in repeating strips, with the background done in Tunisan stitch and the pattern cross stitched on. Another use I can think of is to use the black strip by itself as a frame design on a cross stitch pattern with a Victorian theme.

First FO in a long time...

...and I finished it in less than an hour! It wasn't much of a project - just a little something to keep my youngest son busy.

Nathan, for reasons unknown to genetic scientists, loves cleaning around the house. He is only one year of age, and has a particular interest in stealing the mop and swishing it all over the kitchen floor. This would normally be encouraged, because nobody else here in our house really wants to take up this task, but he's a little dangerous with it - often clobbering unsuspecting victims in the back of their heads with the handle when they are seated at the dinner table.

So I created his own personal mop from an old chair leg (sawed off & sand-papered smooth) and crocheted a nice little mop head onto it from some polyester novelty yarn that I had hiding in my closet.

The polyester yarn is horrible to work with on it's own, so I mixed it with some spare Bernat Handcrafter's cotton to stabilize it.

I started by crocheting a chain around the knob and forming it into a ring. (Hand modeled by my lovely DD Deborah)


Next, it's just a matter of crocheting a long chain and slip stitching back into the base of the ring. I made chains of 30 stitches in length.

Halfway there

Ring is now filled, just flip over and...

....Nathan's mini mop is ready to go.

The smile on his face says it all :)