The Introverted Crafter

Well the second month of the year is almost over (I am aware that there is an extra day tomorrow but I felt like updating tonight.) and it's time for my resolution update. 1. No fizzy drinks for a year - piece of piss. I don't think I will drink fizzy ever again. 2. Exercise every day - still doing weights every morning, and either cycling or walking every day on top. Waiting for the weather to improve so I can take my bicycle out 3. Saving £250 a month - second lot put into ISA. I have decided that my monthly treats can come out of this. As an example I took the money for Feb's treat (a double bicycle bag for both me and mum) out of here so that I could get some decent ones 4. First draft of one book - writing 500 words a day every day is helping tremendously. 5. Finish Beauty and the Beast stitch - page 2 is finished! Which means as I have set aside three months for each page (plus three for the additions at the end) I am one month ahead and I can work on my Middle ...

It's my aunt and uncle's 40th wedding anniversary next month (you will already have seen the stitch I made for the occasion) so today I decided to do an anniversary card for them. One thing I have noticed is that cards that are for a couple (ie not the ones from a wife to her husband) all seem a little bit girly. All well and good, but men celebrate anniversaries too, and the best card will be for both members of a couple, whether a hetero or homosexual couple. Anyway, enough drivel, here's to the card! I've been looking at Tim Holtz tags lately, and he has been revisiting some of his techniques. I took a few of those techniques for the card.     This is the first technique - stencil embossing. Basically you use a stencil and add distress ink through it, then before the ink dries you add clear embossing powder, take off the excess and heat set it. You get a lovely shine to the hearts which you can just see at the top of the picture.   A slightly diff...

Today I received the second official Beadhaul box (wish I'd signed up for the trial one but hey-ho). The theme was announced as stargirl a while ago and to be perfectly honest it was with some trepidation that I opened the box this morning. Stargirl seemed to me like something aimed at early teenage girls, but boy was I wrong!   You always get two pieces of card, a greetings type one (this one) which gives you more of a clue of what the theme is about. I love the inclusion of Ziggy Stardust here. The second one is a picture of all that should be in the box, just in case there's something missing Aluminium wire - always good for essential works   Natural hermatite star beads - I love these. Grungy and galactic at the same time.   A silver plated chain. I'm glad they include some essentials in each box.   Crystal glass faceted bicone beads   Square copper seed beads - I've only ever seen the usual round beads seed bead wise ...

As you can tell, I love cross stitch! So today's post will be stitchy related again. (The next one won't be) First of all, I have finished one of the bookmarks I was making.   I found a quote about reading that I liked, stitched that, then chose five colours that I thought went well together, stitching diagonal stripes six stitches wide. It was supposed to be five but I miscounted the first stripe! Finally I backstitched the words in brown. It is so important to backstitch things like this, really makes it stand out.   Here is the update on the Beauty and the Beast stitch. I'm hoping to get this page done before the end of March deadline, as any free time I have between the three month pages is going to be spent working on the next project.   Speaking of the next project....   Check out this mammoth bag of threads!!! There is over 150 threads here, all for the Heaven and Earth Designs Middle Earth map. The chart is 110 pages long, so wha...

Where does the time go? When I was a kid those six weeks of summer seemed so long, now I'm older time seems to be moving ever faster. Too fast sometimes. This month I will turn 32, and I still feel like I'm not an adult. Today will be a stitchy post, as that is what I have been doing. I've been splitting my time between different projects as the Beauty and the Beast stitch is ahead of schedule at the present time.   Here is where I am - you'll notice that while I worked almost mini square by mini square with the left hand side, I've been a bit random so far on the rest. It's funny how there looks like loads of gaps on the stitch, but on the pattern it seems somehow fuller.   I dug through my stash and found a couple of bookmark style pieces of aida. The first is for myself. I found an alphabet stitch online and used black to stitch a LOTR quote. I haven't finished yet, I want to do a background for it.   Here is the second one. I ha...