Saying "Hi"

Golly gosh! It's been ages since I blogged on here. Virtual dust settled down and cobwebs spread everywhere. Does anybody still come here? I wonder. 

I am alive. I still create, though at a more relaxed pace. Life goes on. It always does, doesn't it? There are good days, there are bad days. Gladly, there are more better days than bad days. Oh, and of course time flies...

It's hard to share all crafty news in one post so I'll stick to one at a time. This year I've been invited by a Polish friend of mine,  Monika, to cooperate with her and run a shop on Etsy for her. With this step I basically became a trend-spotter, Etsy account manager, translator, advisor, advertiser and an admin, all rolled in one. I hadn't had any experience with selling online especially on such widely known websites like Etsy, Craftsy and the like before and wasn't sure how marketing things are done. Neither hadMonika. So me and her are taking our first steps and learning as we go. The Etsy shop we have specializes in selling cross stitch charts in a form of digital pdf patterns (instant downloads) for stitcher of all levels. Monika designs the charts, I put them in her Etsy store. We enjoy our work and cooperation. 

Come and visit us in our Etsy store. You can always ask us a question or just say hi.

The Little Polish Needle 

All stitchers welcome.

We keep adding new patterns regularly and frequently. Here are some of our newest charts.

The collections of seasonal trees:

Lots of Polish folklore - beautiful vibrant designs for all.

Polish "wycinanki" style

Polish folk embroidery in Kashubian style:

Kurpie region style:

Seaside themed cross stitch designs:

Gorgeous alphabets in various styles:

Fantastic Felines for cat lovers:

...and many more to discover and try. Do come over :)

The Little Polish needle is also on Twitter and Facebook:

Meet us on Twitter :)

Visit us on Facebook.

See you there! 

Trick or Treat - finished

It's been a while since I was here. Again. Time flies, eh? I hope everyone had a good Christmas. Mine was brill and very busy too so I didn't have much time for festive crafts. Not long before Christmas I finished my cross stitched halloween project - Trick or Treat by The Prairie Schooler. It hasn't been framed yet and it's awaiting a right picture frame. I'm thinking of something dark, perhaps sculpted, embossed, textured. This detailed project definitely deserves a quality frame.

Details: 

Cross stitch chart: The Prairie Schooler, Booklet nr 188 "TRICK OR TREAT"

linen: 32 ct, antique white, DMC

threads: DMC

design size: about 22cm x 16cm

The beauty of this design lies in the detail. There are lots of tiny details that add to the overall halloween charm. Obviously, I'm loving the orange accents here too - the pumpkins, the jack-o-lanterns, the halloween sweets...

Lots is happening here. The witches and bats are flying, the pumpkins and cats are celebrating and trick-or-treating. the moon is chuckling eerily. Add the settings to this with the haunted mansion on the hill in the background, ghosts flowing out of chimneys, scary-looking owls watching from the dramatically twisted branches and voila! Halloween in full progress.

It's scary and spooky but in a friendly way, of course :)

I thoroughly enjoyed myself stitching this project.  I'm looking forward to more Halloween projects of this sort in the future. I also loved stitching with a darker thread on a white linen. It was like drawing with a black marker on paper :) You can see your progress instantaneously.

Well, that's it for today. Have a nice week everybody. Thanks for stopping by.

Happy Halloween

Oh dear. I haven't been a very good blogger this year being offline more than ever. I should really try harder to come online and update my blog more frequently. Sorry about that if you are the one to be waiting for a new After Hours blog note.

So....It's time for a catch-up. As it's Halloween today and I've been in that nostalgic autumnal mood for candles, pumpkins, spices and all, I thought I'd show you what I've been working on for the past few days: a Halloween project from the Prairie Schooler called Trick or Treat:

It's been taking me long hours to work the cross stitches on this very fine linen but I'm loving all the fine details cross stitch and blackwork create as I'm slowly ploughing through the project. This is how the stitching progressed:

I started with a little witch girl going trick-or-treating...

Then I gave her 2 companions, a black kitty and an owl :)

It is getting more and more interesting as more characters are popping up on the canvas :) Finally I've stitched the spooky haunted house on a hill. It took me two days to stitch it but at last all the details are in and it does look grand as it is a significant part of the project. 

I'm really enjoying this project. One of the things I love about The Prairie Schooler designs is that many of them require only a few colours to stitch and yet they achieve such great detail and originality. There's a little designing genius behind these designs, don't you think?

More work progress soon! Tonight I'm going to work a bit on the background :)

Today I'm celebrating Halloween with a glass of cold cider on ice and some spooky treats. Hope you have had a good one! :)

HAPPY HALLOWEEN and thanks for visiting and leaving a word behind x x

Christmas in July

Did you know that LEON Day (Noel spelt backwards) falls on 25th July - and marks the halfway point to Christmas? For some crafters it's time to start thinking about what hand-made stuff they want to make / sell for Christmas. So I decided to do some pre-Christmas planning and reviewing. As a multi-crafter I usually have a few projects on the go and mid-summer is the right time for me to think and plan what I would like to create for Christmas. Lots of projects like cross stitch or knitting stretch over time and require some planning and systematic work so I will have to keep up a good crafting to complete them by December.

This year my Christmas crafting will mean finishing some old projects and trying a couple of new ones. Perhaps you remember me knitting all 55 Scandinavian Christmas balls by Arne and Carlos. Well, this year I would like to knit some more and they are going to make an Advent calendar. There are 24 balls to knit. I'm going to embellish them with some ribbons, little bells and hand-stitched cross stitch tags with numbers so they look like a calendar. I've already knitted two advent calendar balls that need stuffing. 22 to go :)

Next on the agenda is this beautiful festive sampler I started last year. There's still much stitching to go ahead and I'm looking forward to finishing it. It's going to look splendid with all that sparkly silver thread. Stitching it on a dark background slows it a bit though but it's worth in the end.

And finally the 3rd project to finish off is "Nordic Holiday" from The Prairie Schooler. 4 tiles stitched,  another 5 to go :) I'm really loving these primitive folk motifs The Prairie Schooler treats us to every year. 

So much for the UFO's (reads: UnFinished Objects). Now onto the shopping bit :) As a part of preparation of Christmas crafting, I've treated myself to some new cross stitch patterns I spotted online. Looks like JBW Designs released some new Scandi-style patterns. I'm hoping to lay my hand on them too!

Oh, and of course I still have the two sets of cross stitch cards from the previous year to make. That's my Christmas cards 2015 sorted :)

And here are my new Prairie Schooler charts I've bought this month. They came all the way from the USA. I've fancied these charts for a while and I'm dying to start them. The Reindeer Roundup and the Sleepy Christmas Village will have to wait for their turn though...

... because I'm so in love with this pattern - Evergreen. This is the newest release from The Prairie Schooler. I loved it this instant and I rushed to the shops to get my own copy. I also managed to buy a nice piece of sage-coloured linen in preparation for the project. Really looking forward to starting this one! Excited! :D

Evergreen is a beautiful collection of 9 festive tiles, each different, yet all coordinated in style and colours. You also get two extra tiles to stitch separately as add-ons. The genius of The Prairie Schooler designs is that details are achieved just by simple cross stitches, minimal backstitch and with only few colours of stranded cotton. Perfect for me! :) Roll on Christmas!

If you also like to think about Christmas in the middle of a hot summer, do tell me about. I'd love to hear about you future festive plans and preparations. 

Cheerio x

Martha

Mishmash :)

Hello. A few things to blog about today. When the latest issue of Cross Stitch Card Shop came through with the post last month, there was a letter attached for its subscribers. Basically the publishers dropped a bombshell announcing that they are stopping publishing this magazine due to marketing difficulties. I'm gutted. I really am. I liked it. Entirely devoted to cross stitched cards and with a variety of motifs to choose from. One of its kind on the market and now taken away while other similar mags still sell alongside. I will miss this mag definitely.

However the magazine itself doesn't mention a word about closing off. What's more, there is even a preview of the next issue. I do hope I'll find it in my mailbox 'cause I really love those cute cards with pink and orange owls :) The attached letter says The World of Cross Stitching will be taking over the ideas and it will be sent out to those subscribers whose subscription of Cross Stitch Card Shop hasn't finished yet. 

While Cross Stitch Card Shop is soon disappearing from the Brititsh magazine market, a new magazine has turned up on the shelves - Total Crochet Amigurumi. This is a nice mag full of crochet projects in form of amigurumis. I managed to get hold of the two first issues. I especially love the crocheted bunnies and teddies featured on the cover. The overall style of the magazine differs a lot from the British ones and one can easily guess it is not a product from the UK. It must be American, Candian or perhaps Australian, not sure.

The nice thing about this magazine is the fact it doesn't feature any advertisements (yay!) as opposed to the British craft mags that are excessively padded with paid adverts and wasted pages, which really gets on my nerves sometimes. It contains written crochet instructions followed up by numerous photos which makes it easier to work through the projects. I hope it lasts on the market and we will draw many interesting ideas from it.

My dear boyfriend-o has recently treated me to some Easter craft goodies :) Bless him. Here is what I brought from Hobby Craft - some cute wooden block stamps and springy ribbons. 

I particularly love the ribbons. They are cute and I could adorn my knitted bunnies with them :)

Apart from the stamps and ribbons, a few balls of DMC Natura cotton made it into my shopping basket. The juicy green and the slate grey balls came from eBay though. 

I'm especially craving for something fresh and this juicy grassy green is particularly attracting my eye.

In the meantime I'm knitting a pink bunny :) Currently I'm working on its arms and head :) It's coming on! Bit by bit. I'm thinking of giving it to a little girl who adores everything sweet and pink :)

And here is what has happened recently to my cross stitch project - a disaster. I'm gutted as these were supposed to be the cards finished for February and now this major setback with the threads has cropped up. After washing the stitches in lukewarm water and drying them out on a towel, the red Anchor thread discoloured and left the pink stains. I am really mistrustful of this brand now. My fault, I should have pre-washed the Anchor cotton first. For comparison, I've never been let down by the DMC reds. 

There is no other way than to stitch the background over with a white thread and hope for an improvement. So it's DMC this time. No more Anchor for me please.

Well, I went even a bit further and experimented with a colour catcher. Nope. It didn't really help and it even altered the remaining colours. Will have to stitch this motif again. 

Well that my experimenting with washing the cross stitch done. I always wash my stitches no matter how small they are. Whether it is a motif stitched for a card or a large sampler. I just like to know it is fresh and clean. I just couldn't bear a thought is was stitched, touched many times and just left grubby. 

So, what do you do for your stitches? :) 

Christmas Cards of 2014

Hi all. I'm alive but still struggling to find more time for blogging but hey, here I am here today with some more crafty news. I know, I know it's way past Christmas and most of us are already thinking of Easter days but I still wanted to show you my festive cross stitched cards into which I  had put lots of time and effort so it would be shame not to mention them. 

So here they are. Ta Dah!

A set of 6 Christmas cross stitched cards. Patterns for the motifs come from an archival issue of Cross Stitch Cardshop, issue no. 81. I liked these as soon as I saw them and knew I'd have to stitch them one day.

It takes at least 6-8 hrs to stitch a single motif. There are satin and metallic threads in them too. They give  those nice shiny light effects. Buttons add an extra dimension too. A few close-ups:

I think the Christmas tree with tiny cute buttons is my favourite in this card collection :) I may feel tempted to stitch this motif again sometime.

The elf boots are sweet too, I think.

All in all it has taken me 2 years to finish these cards. I lost my motivation and patience half way through and came back to finish them off 2 Christmases later. I'm very pleased how they turned out.

I obviously couldn't resist embellishing the aperture cards as well. Not too much though otherwise the embellishments would overshadow the cross stitch itself.

And this is what they looked like when put on my still festive window. They look quite good as a group, don't you think? :)

In the meantime I couldn't stop myself from starting another big project - a gorgeous Christmas sampler. This one will be stitched throughout the whole year and hopefully finished by Christmas 2015. 

The canvas is navy which means stitching this piece of work requires a great deal of sunlight and I can only stitch it while I'm sitting in my conservatory without risking an eyestrain. Too cold at the moment but it will be more pleasant later in the year and I'm really looking forward to see how this sampler is coming on. The pattern requires a lot of Anchor Reflecta metallic thread so I predict some battles with fraying threads. The stitching with metallic threads is slow but the design is stunning so eventually it will be worth all the effort. 

Currently I'm busing myself with knitting some Easter bunnies as gifts and a bit of crochet too. I'm thinking of trying some new projects, some being a little out of my comfort zone. Lots in plans, just need to stretch my day a bit... by a few hours at least ;)

Hope you are all ok and thanks for stopping by here x x