April of Felt-o-rama just bought a Sizzix Big Shot Express to use in die-cutting shapes from felt. The major advantage of this model is that it has an electric pushbutton instead of a handcrank. (Much less wear and tear on the old shoulder, elbow, and wrist.) For those of us who enjoy embroidering and beading small felt pieces for collage, brooches, whatever, die-cutting would be a godsend. I’m starting a piggy bank right now just for this juicy piece of equipment. April tells more about her experience with the machine and evaluates its performance on her blog. See the post.
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Cross Stitch Cards for All Occasions
I have never stitched a greeting card, but I kind of like the idea of it. It’s a card and a gift all in one, and hopefully one the recipient will hang onto for years to come.
This collection of easy and colorful greeting card cross stitch patterns from Susan Bates (via Gathered) are a great place to start if you want to stitch your own greeting cards.
These text-based designs cover a lot of card-sending events, such as:
- get well soon
- happy birthday
- thank you
- thinking of you
- congratulations
- anniversary
- new home
- good luck
The lettering is done in gradients and there are other details like hearts and stars, a house key and a gift, depending on the text. There are full cross stitches and back stitch on all of the cards, and they use 15 colors for the cross stitching and six for the back stitching (and just two colors are used for both, so it’s 19 colors total).
The designs vary a bit in size but the biggest one is 52 by 67 stitches, which comes out to 3.75 by 4.75 inches or 9.5 by 12 cm when worked on 14 count fabric or 28 count evenweave. The text suggests beads are also used in the patterns but there’s no note of them in the key, so go wild and add some beads if you like.
Designs are worked on a price of 6 by 8 inch/15 by 20 cm fabric and then mounted to a card with a colorful baking piece of card stock behind it. This is easy to assemble with whatever cardstock greeting cards you have on hand.
You can get the free charts as a PDF from Gathered.
Have you ever stitched your own greeting cards? I’d love to hear about it, or let me know if these inspire you to try.
[Photo: Susan Bates via Gathered]