cross stitch bookmarks and supplies

Hearts / Love / Valentine's

Clover / Irish / Lucky / St Patrick's Day

Cross-stitch Evil Eye and Greek Key French Hair barrettes

One of the issues of having perma-straight hair is that you can’t do much with it in terms of styling without using enough hair products to mohawk a horse. Because of this, I’ve developed a taste for wearing French hair barrettes. My fascination with the variety of these that I can wear for any occasion also led me to being rather enthusiastic in making my own.

Due to my love of classical history, I couldn’t resist creating these from my cross stitch kit, pieces of felt, and my trusty hot glue gun. As usual, I used a little nail varnish on the backs to make the threads stay in place. The felt was cut as 2 identical pieces that were glued together as it makes them stiffer in order to make a decent barrette back/base. All these were then glued on top of the metal French barrette base.

I thought it would be pretty nice to try a Greek-key design, but in black instead of the traditional blue….

Ever since I was little, I’ve always been fascinated by the design of the evil eye, when I saw my neighbor wearing one on a pin that she had gotten on a family holiday to turkey. This led into my experimentation with all the ways that you could use this design as a decorative symbol…

Cross Stitch Bananza - continued

As part of my re-opened interest in cross stitch, I also realized that there are quite a few people who I know who seem to like octopus/cthulhu. The great thing about these designs is that they can be quite unisex, which means that I don’t have to be too selective about who I give them to as I don’t really like keeping all of the stuff that I make as it tends to take up space and I’m not very good at preserving things that I want to hang onto.

So it was really awesome that during a google search for ‘simple cross stitch octopus patterns’ that I found these two awesome designs.

1) Courtesy of http://hancockshouseofhappy.blogspot.com.au/2011/02/free-cute-octopus-valentine-cross.html

2) 2) OK, so the site is ‘knitting designs’ but the pattern is in squares so it works really well for cross stitch too…http://www.knitperfect.com/Knitting-Charts/Octopus-v1-Knit-Chart 

 

Cross Stitch Bananza

It turns out that I have been on something of a cross stitch haitus for many years.

This is surprising given my obsession with crafting and the fact that it was one of the first crafty things I ever learned to do.

So after my mum found a cross stitch bookmark that I had started making in primary school and then left lying around, I finally decided to finish it with the help of a google search re suitable sized designs. It does make me wonder how it would have looked had I finished it 16 years ago without the aid of the internet....

So I guess it was also a really good thing that there are now big crafty shops like Lincraft around for me to get hold of supplies...

To save money, I decided to get a tapestry threads kit and was recommended to get a size 20 tapestry needle for a 14 thread count (?).

I am very proud of myself for finally finishing this. Like with my seed bead items, I also fixed the loose threads at the back with a little clear nail varnish...

NB: the parts that I did when I was 8 is my initials, the border, the flower (snowdrop - my favourite at the time) and the bunny...I added designs of things that I remember myself liking at that time...