January's craft: Cross stitch

January seems to have flown by incredibly quickly - so I'm finding it a little tight to get the first of my monthly craft posts in. This year I'm going to try and complete a project using a different craft each month and to start me off I've been working on a little cross stitch project.

This little cross stitch kit is was the free gift that comes with the Cath Kidstone "Stitch" that I got for Christmas. The kit is to make up a simple little purse on some pre-printed canvas fabric. To help keep your stitches lovely and even you are also provided with a little piece of dissolvable cross stitch cloth. Once I had finished working the cross stitch design on the front of the purse I got to rinse the canvas in water and see the dissolvable stuff magically disappear. Before finishing up the purse I also added a piece of white felt to the back of the design which will hopefully help prevent any of the thread at the back of the work getting pulled.

Pretty and quick - my favourite type of project! Now I wonder what I shall do for February?

A new venture?

My regular followers are possibly getting tired of seeing photos of baby booties - I seem to make them a lot. In fact I make them so much I even designed my own pattern for them (which is currently available through the CrochetMe website but hopefully will be moved over to Raverly later this year as the CrochetMe page is getting heavily spammed).

Last year I was finding myself very frustrated at not having any of my own earnings coming in and I wanted to try and find some sort of flexible/part time money making venture. I did a basic "how to start your own business" course and after that registered as a Phoenix trader and started selling their beautiful cards.

I also started crocheting booties - lots and lots of booties. I've simplified and fine tuned my crochet bootie design, sampled a number of different yarns as well as stocking up on some of the lovely hand dyed buttons that paper-and-string sells. So now I have quite a pile of booties made up and after I've worked out how to set up an Etsy shop as well as draw up a logo I'll be able to start selling these too!

Real life angry birds

Remember the red angry bird I made for my husband recently (the geeky crochet post is here)? Well I also managed to make the green pig to go with it and I'm very happy with them both.

After a bit of a play with some of my 3 year old's building blocks we managed to get this action photo of a real life game of angry birds. I love these - if you do too then you should be able to get hold of the free patterns through Ravelry (red bird, green pig)

Wishes for the New Year

Happy New Year fellow crafters! I hope you all had a lovely Christmas and a fantastic New Year.

We've spent the last few days here at Tea Towers tidying away Christmas decorations and getting a few odd jobs done round the house. Our son's room is finally how we want it with pictures up on the wall and all his toys unpacked and currently arranged neatly about the room. We have also been trying to get more of our family photos printed out and framed so our new house is finally feeling like home.

With the extra kick of starting the New Year well I also want to do some tidying around my blog. This year I would love to be able to make more use of my free time and do a lot more crafting so hopefully I'll have more to share with you all. These are a few of my blog related New Years resolutions:

• Make at least one Christmas tree decoration each month (so that I'll have a good stash of them in time for Christmas 2012)
• Try and write about a different craft each month 
• Do more book reviews - I have lots that I want to write reviews for... just trying to find the time to test projects from each of them
• Dust off the sewing machine and start using it regularly.

That list should keep me out of mischeif for this year - what are all of your craft resolutions?

Geeky crochet

My husband is a gamer. If I had more time then I would probably be more of a gamer myself. Sadly free time isn't one something I have much of at the moment - but in the few short slots of quiet time I am managing to steal for myself I've been able to get a couple of little crochet projects done.

One of the good things about having a geeky husband is that there are always plenty of amigurumi projects that I can make for him - my Ravelry queue is always bursting with tons of possible projects. Amigurumi is fantastically suited to making cartoony toys and so perfect for so many of the creatures and items to be found in video games. My favourite of these would have to be the 'Mr Bubbles' that I made him last year - which though the hardest amigurumi project I've ever done it is also the one I am most proud of.

Recently I completed a 'weighted companion cube' for him (which is from another of the brilliant designs by nerdigurumi).  If you've not heard of the game Portal then it may seem a little strange to take the time to crochet a cube - but believe me it is a fantastic game and this little inanimate cube has a big fan following and so has quite a few free crochet patterns as well as some pretty amazing reproductions - just type 'weighted companion cube' into a google image search and prepare to be impressed.

Most recently I have just finished up a much quicker pattern for one of the birds from the 'angry birds' game which my husband plays on his iPhone. This game involves catapulting some kamikaze birds into some fortified pigs with hard hats - strange but oddly addictive. If I had more time then I would give making one of the green pigs a go so that Rich could have something to target his new angry bird at - perhaps I'll get round to it later in the year - along with all the other cool but geeky patterns that I want to try...

Slime from the Dragon quest games
Lemmings
Mario mushrooms

Quick ornaments

Even though I'd given myself a year off from Christmas crafting I couldn't resist making a few little ornaments as presents. These little trees are one of the projects in "Fa la la felt" a simply gorgeous book containing 45 different Christmas decorations you can make with felt.

These trees looked to be the simplest in the book - just a simple shape with some freehand back stitching for decoration and after whip stitching both pieces together you're done. So very quick and satisfying, I would have made more but I ran out of felt!

Now I should really go and wrap some presents... happy Christmas crafting everyone!

Christmas cross stitching

Our little girl is now 2 months old and things are finally starting to get into more of a routine here at Tea Towers. For the past two months I have spent every evening trying to settle Emily by holding her in my arms which makes doing any craft particularly difficult. As we are starting to get better at settling her down in her basket I'm starting to have my hands free for half an hour every evening which has finally given me the time to finish off these pretty cross stitch decorations.

I tend not to do much cross stitch now I have kids as there is never enough time in the day to do long projects and if I tried to do a large piece it would take me years to complete. However, I was given a copy of a cross stitch magazine while in hospital before having Emily and it included a lovely kit to make these cute little Christmas houses. Surprisingly I found it didn't take me long at all to do the cross stitch element of these houses, what took the time was having to sew them all up, iron and stuff with fiberfill. I'm really pleased with how they came out though and will have to try and choose one to keep for us as the other two already have intended new homes.