Craft Gossip

Dear God, Why is this owl wearing a belt? I don’t really need an answer but it is so cute I figured only a deity could truly understand it.

This otter card is even cuter and if thy had this in the retail show I would have bought it.
nightowl011
This adorable owl wearing a belt screen printed onto a birch notecard is by Night Owl Paper Goods. I was in a local paper shop recently and came across these beautiful cards screened onto a thin piece of birch wood. The wood is Eco-friendly sustainably harvested yellow birch and has a lovely smooth sturdy feel to it. Here’s what they have to say about the wood they use:

Wood is sliced thin to produce a large number of unique products from a small amount of raw material. In turn, no water & very little power are used.
Birch trees are replanted each spring.

Night Owl Paper Goods also makes custom birch business cards and wedding invites. These would work really well as a lovely keepsake wedding invite or wedding place cards. Place cards would be better I think. Other people probably won’t clutter up their house holding on to your wedding invite but if these cards were printed up with each guests name and a pretty image people would want to keep them.

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Lately I have been feeling like all of my clothes are looking a little worn or feeling a little tired. I don’t want to buy new clothes, though, so there’s been a lot of mending, altering and adding special touches to things that otherwise might get overlooked or not worn at all.

As an example, not too long ago I added a little bit of embroidery to a T-shirt, which was a lot of fun to do and made me start eyeing all my solid-colored garments and wondering how they might look with some stitching added.

Of course you can cross stitch on garments, too, whether T-shirts or woven tops, skirts, pants and more. But it can be tricky to transfer cross stitch designs to your garment to make stitching easier.

Much like with embroidery, it’s great to use a water soluble stabilizer to keep your fabric in place while you stitch and to transfer your design (or your cross stitch grid at least) while you’re stitching. Then you just wash away the stabilizer when you’re done and it will look like the stitching has always been there.

Ashley General Handmade uses Sulky Stick ‘n Stitch, which is a product I use, too. It’s easy to use and washes away cleanly.

To make it even easier, she designed some printable cross stitch grids at different counts that you can print out to draw your own cross stitch designs, but you can also print the grid right on the Sulky, so you can stitch on top of squares and then remove them when you’re done.

Brilliant, right?

She has pages as big as 8 count and all the way down to 20 (remember: the bigger the number the smaller the stitches will be) that you can download and print to make your own designs and also use to make stitching on clothing easier. I’m definitely going to try this the next time I want to cross stitch on fabric!

You can grab her printables over at Ashley General Handmade.

[Photo: Ashley General Handmade]

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