Pouch, Halloween and Bookmark

My long-time stitching buddy, Hetti, received the little gift I made her to celebrate some good news in her life.  Hetti is one of the first stitchers from whom I received an exchange piece back in 2006.  Check out her blog if you don't know it.  Hetti has free designs and tutorials for all kinds of cute little x-stitch things.  I made her a little scissors case from the Pennsylvania Blossom design by Beth Seal.  This is a freebie for the Prim Stitchers Society members on FB.  The case is lined with a snap closure on the inside top.  Hetti seems to use red, white and blue a lot in her stitching, so I thought the cute polka-dot scissors would be perfect for her.  The case is large enough to hold some extras, so I added a few skeins of HDF silk floss as well.

Amazingly, the case turns out to fit her cell phone perfectly and she is now using it for that purpose as you can see below.  If I had been trying for that, I would never have made a case that fit that well.

Hetti's sister, Miek, likes to dye fabric and threads.  Making the scissors case reminded me of the beautiful hand dyed fabrics I have in my stash that Miek sent me some time ago.  I decided to make a couple of Halloween cards from one of the pieces.  The first is a design from the The Flossbox.  Zombies like to trick or treat too you know!

The second is an old freebie,  "Des Fillles et Halloween", by Nathalie of Jardin Prive.  Originally the design was available on this site, www.desfillesetuneaiguille.com.
I don't think it is there now.  It makes me think of a stylish version of the Shakespeare Weird Sisters.  Love those cinched in waists on the two end ladies.

And, while I was playing with the fabric, I grabbed this beauty and stitched a bookmark for WOCS from a design in "Bookmarks Galore" from Leisure Arts.  It was tricky to find something that would work with all of those colors, but i think this blended in quite well.

Fabric box and quilt square

I used to adore stitching Linda Coleman's Cross Country Stitching pieces.  They are so adorable, but I often felt she over-did the back-stitching thing.  She has started offering some of her small designs as freebies on her FB page and her little summer fruit bowl caught my eye.  It just showed the chart with no finished model and I find it hard to visualize what it will really look like when that's all I have.  I was in the mood for bright colors, so as an experiment, I decided to stitch it up and use the least amount of back-stitching I could get away with.  Turned out just fine and it's making me re-think the designs in some of my old magazines.

I was tired of finishing x-stitch pieces the same old way.  I looked around the web for new ideas.  I prefer simple sewing projects.  Just can't get excited about painting, staining and gluing.  I have sewing supplies and no room for more 'stuff', so I'd rather go in that direction.  I found a cute little fabric box tutorial on Pinterest and decided to substitute my x-stitch piece for one side.  Made a few mistakes, but I'm really happy with the finish.  A little heavyweight craft interfacing made it pretty sturdy.   I'll probably keep it by my stitching chair for a while as an ORT collector.  Almost too pretty to use that way.
The stitching is over-two on 35 count HDF linen.  

You can get the chart by clicking here to the FB photo.
The tute for the box is here.

I continue to do an occasional quilt square for WOCS.  This one is for a quilt with a sewing theme.  Little House Needleworks "Needle and Thread" was just the right size and a quick, enjoyable project for this quilt.  This is done on 32 count lugana with my choice of DMC colors.  I thought my ironing job was pretty well done til I looked at the photo!