TEMPTING ADS – Craft Gossip

I purchased the latest two issues of Interweave Crochet Magazine at my LYS last night. I just love this magazine. There were some ads that were so appealing looking that I decided to visit the websites to see exactly what they had to offer crocheters. Here’s what I found:

This beauty if from purlbee.com, but most of their goodies seem to be knitted (boo hoo):

Joelle's Giant Granny Square

Add this site to your faves for buttons. It takes you to two button manufacturers (they also have yarn and hooks). This set of irresistable hearts is from buttonmad.com:

buttonmad.com via accessoriesunlimitedinc.com

Hard to hold onto the one’s credit card with all these scrumptious goodies available at the touch of a key.

Elann.com offers many wonderful yarns and some free patterns (among other things). This ethereal little shawl is one of their free crochet patterns:

elann.com superplum capelet free pattern

I never expected to find information like this through an ad in a magazine, but if you’ve ever thought of yourself as a potential crochet designer, you gotta check out this extensive article at www.crochetasylum.com:
http://crochetasylum.com/cart/page.html?chapter=0&id=10

Doesn’t hurt that they also sell, among lots of crochet ‘hardware’, these appealing hook holders – each one is unique:

http://crochetasylum.com/cart/felted-wool-hook-rollup-custom-no-two-alike-p-23.html

Finally – for today – I’ll leave you with this sample of a Universal Yarns product. I had this stuff in my hands last night at the LYS. It’s luscious stuff. If I’d been able to see it swatched, I’d have bought several balls. I wasn’t familiar with Universal Yarns until yesterday! Glad this ad took me to their site so I’ll know what to look for at the LYS next time.

: Universal Yarns Classic Worsted Impressions – Color ‘Camouflage’ www.universalyarns.com

I’ll have more Tempting Ads details soon.

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I’ve recently been doing more embroidery than usual, and while I do tend to be rather intuitive when I stitch rather than planning it out too much or caring if all the stitches are perfect, there was a particular section that I felt the need to rip out. Twice.

In cross stitch as well as embroidery, there may come a time when you need to rip out a few stitches or a big section of a project. Maybe you put a stitch or a few where they didn’t belong, used the wrong color or just didn’t like the look of something once it was on the fabric.

What’s the best way to work back in cross stitch? As with most things, the answer is it depends.

But for a look at your options, I don’t think I’ve seen a better rundown than this post from Sirious Stitches. There’s a video in the post if you don’t want to read it all, but either way there are some great ideas and things to think about when you need to rip out stitches.

I think we’ve all stitched backwards from time to time when we put a stitch or two in the wrong place, but it’s helpful to know what the best solution is when you’ve got more ground to cover. Or uncover, in this case.

Personally I was a little afraid to use a seam ripper but I’m glad to see that’s a valid option if you’re careful.

The post also has good tips for cleaning up your project after you rip things out, since you might have some stray thread tails of fuzzy bits that need to be dealt with before you get back to stitching.

There’s lots of great stuff in there worth reading before you need it and keeping handy in case you need to remove a bunch of stitches from a project.

Have you ever ripped out a lot of cross stitch? I’d love to hear how you went about it.

[Photo: Sirious Stitches]

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