A Crafty Mixtape (Mix-CD)

I was very enthusiatic about embroidery for roughly four days in November, before setting my 1/3 finshed sampler down in frustration and promptly forgetting about it. (Lazy daisies are not my friends.)

While knitting and sewing, the lovely wearable end product definately fires my obsession, and I just don't feel that drive with embroidery. I'm going through a slightly vagrant life-stage, so making things to decorate a house I might only live in for 6 months seems a bit pointless. I'd rather make clothes than embellish them. I still have some grand scale embroidery dreams, but I can't quite be bothered with the learning curve of smaller projects it will take to get there.

All this said, I have finally completed a (very very small) embroidery piece!

This week I was making a long owed mixtape for my favourite gentleman caller. (Well, it was a mix-CD, but that just doesn't sound as good!) I wanted to make a sweet cover for it, but unfortunately I am challenged in the artistic department and lumbered with decidely unattractive handwriting. Crafts to the rescue!

 

   

I read somewhere that good embroidery is as neat on the inside as on the outside...

I doubt Andy has ever watched Mean Girls, but I amuse myself at least...

Well... Almost there!

First post, and learning embroidery

Hello, my name's Kirsty and I like science and crafts. This blog is about the crafts, but my love of science and a certain dead naturalist will probably pop up at some point.

I am a keen (obsessive) knitter, but am keen to widen my crafty horizons. My intended first step down this path has been to learn embroidery. It seems to offer something much closer to instant gratification than knitting, where I'm lucky to gain a few inches from an evening's work. I also have a dream project for a lovely relative which will require some rad stitching skills to accomplish.

Despite these ambitions, I've never got down to it and learnt to embroider. Part of this is because when I tried to find a book to learn from I'm mostly saw books on how to make very complex floral patterns that I would never have the patience to complete, and probably wouldn't want to make in the first place. So last weekend I was very excited to come across 'Stitched Gifts' by Jessica Marquez.

Source: www.miniaturerhino.blogspot

This book is amazing! It has all sorts of simple but effective and quirky projects that I feel like I should be able to make up myself, but can't. Maybe after making a couple of these for inspiration I will be able to. It's great for a beginner such as myself, as it provides a comprehensive list of materials you might need for projects and a clear, illustrated stitch dictionary.

There's a lot of exciting stuff in here, and one project in particular which I want to make as a Christmas gift (possibly multiple times), but I think I'll start as Jessica suggests, with a stitch sampler.

Materials at the ready!

Let's see how instant the gratification is.