Valentine and Birthday Cards

Still doing very little crafting, but it's very satisfying when I manage to do it.  I'm picking tiny charts so I have a chance of finishing them in some reasonable amount of time.   I made this Valentine card from a Tra La La design.   Such a sweet little cup of love.  It's on 36 ct linen and I'm glad to know I can still do 18 stitches per inch!

I have been stitching a birthday card for my brother every year since as long as I can remember.  I usually look for a theme that would be of interest or relevant to him.  Kind of ran out of ideas this year, so I went with a generic birthday cake.  Everybody loves cake, right!
This was from a World of Cross Stitching freebie you can get here.  I think the fabric is 32-count.  I liked it because the white showed up so well.

Two more of the Snowflower Diaries Joyful World designs are now ready for display on the fridge.
I panicked when I accidentally cut the sides without enough seam allowance.  But sometimes recovery is where the fun is, and I managed to get it to work out with a little border fabric.

Took longer than I expected of course, but I still had the mojo to do March as well so I'm ahead of hte game.  I must say that the grommet pliers are really working well after all these years.

Completion of Joyful World SAL

Happy New Year everyone.  I've been somewhat under the weather for a while and it's hard to keep up my good humor.  Haven't done much crafting or even novel reading for a while.   But I did manage to finish up the Snowflower Diaries Joyful World SAL.   I stitched December before November because I loved that design so much and thought I needed the motivation of a design I loved.  But when I went back and did November, I fell in love with that one too.

Changed enough colors in each month to make good contrast and conform more to the original stitched by Maja with hand-dyed threads.  And very happy that my eyes held up for the last 2 over-one months.  Part of my health problem affects the eyes and that's been an additional issue.

Over the course of the SAL I had many ideas about how to use the stitching.  In the end, I decided to do a relatively simple finish of each and I will only do one a month.  I had an ancient grommet tool that I bought a thousand years ago to make a shower curtain.  I never figured out how to use it and was about to give it away during year-end clean-out.  Then I decided to give it one more try since I understood eyelets and grommets better now after making floss tags and luggage tags.  Lo and behold, it worked!    So I added a coordinating fabric border and backing to January and then added the two grommets.  The piece is now hanging from two magnetic hooks on my fridge.  I needed the larger grommet holes so they would fit on the hooks.  I liked these hooks because they keep the piece flat against the fridge unlike the usual cup hooks.

Click here to see the hooks I'm using.  I couldn't get a good photo in the kitchen.