Handmade Haven @ Mono

Sunday saw my second stall with Vegan by Nature at Handmade Haven and our first time at the one in Mono. We managed to end up with a pretty good variety of things we'd made.



For this stall Rachel came up with the idea of a book-theme as can be seen from her amazing peter pan and catcher in the rye cakes. I decided to make some more bookmarks with x-stitch quotes and x-stitch portraits. I swapped the Woody Allen portrait at the last market for an upcycled Joan of Arc journal. I whipped up another Woody for this market because it was a lot of fun to do. I also brought along a crochet blanket that my mum made.
The newest thing I tried was the linen bags with antique lace trims. I hadn't used my sewing machine in a while and had a lot of linen lying around. I bought some old 70's-style pillowcases from a secondhand shop near where I live, turned them inside out sewed them to the inside of the linen and sewed on the lace. They were really quick and easy to make but ended up looking really effective. I'm pretty chuffed with how they turned out.



For more photos of the stall, have a look on my Flickr account

a birthday stitch

A friend of mine turned 30 last week and was having a 70's themed birthday party. I was racking my brains trying to think of what to get her for a present. Laura is a really big fan or Russell Brand and, since I had just finished making my series of x-stitch portraits, I decided to make one for her too.



I've never really liked Russell Brand and so I watched one of his stand ups while I was making this in an effort to understand what all the fuss was about. I still don't get it but I really like how this turned out.

portraits

Around a month ago I started messing around with PCStitch Pro 9, one of many cross stitch software programmes I've tried out. PCStitch Pro 9 is really easy to use and has one thing that the others lacked: common sense.
The first thing that I made was a Woody Allen portrait using the photograph transfer tool. I've seen a fair few cross stitch portraits online and I thought they looked really great. I'd tried a few portraits before I settled on the Woody Allen, all of which were in colour and would've been really expensive to do. This one was perfect because it was in black and white.


I enjoyed doing this portrait a lot and, as a result, have ended up going on to do a little series of them. I haven't had a chance to photograph them all yet as I'm considering composition etc. As soon as I have, I'll upload them.