I'm plotting!

I'm having a fairly quiet day today, and enjoying plotting next months offers and newsletter.  There will be a new colour range launched in the hand dyed section at the beginning of February.  It will be called neutrals, and should contain neutral hand dyeds that will work well with sampler style designs and anything you want a more muted but still hand dyed background for.  Here is one of the new colours as a slight teaser, it's currently named 2601111, so I need to come up with something a little better than that!

Another beautiful WiP picture

This WiP was very kindly sent to me by Karen to share with you.  This is the first part of German Christmas Market (Chatelaine Designs).  Karen is stitching it on 28 count Jazlyn in Evening Magic.  I love the way it's coming out.  I'm really looking forward to seeing part 2!

Reminder and upcoming competition information

Firstly the reminder.  There is less than a week left in January, if you want the LTD edition colour for the month don't forget to order it!

Secondly.  I've got some early warning competition information.  The Crafty Kitten will be celebrating it's first birthday in June.  I know that's quite a way off, but I wanted to give you some pre-warning.  There will be a submitted stitching photos competition.  Basically it'll work like this.

Any photographs that are submitted for the galleries stitched by yourself on a crafty kitten fabric by June 12th 2011 will automatically be entered.  Here are the preliminary categories (these might change a bit, and I will add stitch count info nearer the deadline.

1)  WiPs: you can submit as many WiP pictures as you like before the deadline, only one entry per design you're stitching will be counted (e.g. if you send me weekly updates of a design I'll only count the most recent picture as the entry), if you're stitching multiple designs each will count, as long as there is a reasonable amount of stitching on them (e.g. 10 stitches on a bit of fabric isn't enough!).

2) Completed Small Designs

3) Completed Medium Designs

4) Completed Large Designs

Winners will be selected randomly for each category using a random number generator.  Obviously any WiP pictures from me won't be eligible for the competition!

Prizes will be gift vouchers for the Crafty Kitten, again more details in a few months.

Now for the small print bit!  You MUST only submit pictures of things you have stitched yourself and they MUST be stitched on a Crafty Kitten fabric. 

To make my life a little easier, when you send me a photo of a new WiP please can you let me know who the design is by (saves me hunting about online and acquiring more stash while looking for it!).  What fabric you're stitching it on (colour and count, again my memory is good but it's not perfect!).  Also if you've got a blog I'm more than happy to link to that in the photo album and here on the blog and on FB when I upload your picture.

Links to Finished Work and WiP Galleries

These are hosted on Flickr, and there are links from the front page of the website.  New pictures will still be shared on the blog and through facebook as well. 

Thank you to everyone that has emailed me pictures and made these galleries possible by giving me permission to use them.

Work In Progress Gallery

Finished Work Gallery

These galleries will be updated with new pictures as and when I receive some!

A finish and a WiP picture

Morning! I've had a few pictures sent to me in the last few days so I'm sharing them with you here.  I will sort the gallery out in the next few days, I'm trying to decide the best way to do it at the moment, as soon as I have I'll let you all know.

The first pictures is a finish, this very cute ornament (Blue Ribbon Designs) was stitched by Urszula Pitt on Bonfire Smoke in 22 count Oslo (this was a cut from this months small FOTM pack). You can find her blog here: http://urshsplace.blogspot.com/

I also have some WiP pictures to share.  These are from Nicola Maltby and are of a design called Believe (HAED, Jessica Galbreth artwork).  Nic is stitching the design on 20 count aida in Love in the Mist.  The first picture is of the blank fabric which I took before I mailed it, the other two pictures are of Nics WiP.  You can see more pictures on Nics blog (http://obsessivecrossstitcher.blogspot.com/).

Grab bags are sold out.

They will make another appearance at some point in the future when I have enough odds and ends to put some more together.  I hope everyone who's brought a grab bag enjoys it.  Don't forget to send me pictures of anything you stitch!

Grab bags! (again)

I hope you've all had a nice week.  I had a dig around and found a few more dyed small cuts of fabric.  I've put them together into one more medium grab bag, so those that missed out last week on the grab bags as they sold out rather quickly get another shot if they want one.

Another WiP picture and some posting news

I'm having one of 'those days'.  I've just had to redye an order I dyed over the weekend which I wasn't happy with.  I'm supposed to be about 250 miles from here at the moment having lunch with a friend.  While I'm going to be very late for lunch, I am going still going to be away for a couple of days.  Any orders placed between now and lunchtime Thursday will be mailed off on Friday morning.

There is just one small grab bag left on the site, if you'd like it you'll need to be fairly quick.  There won't be any more for quite a while.

Finally, I've done a little more to Daybreak Moon (Melissa Dawn artwork, charted by HAED), it's tent stitched on 28 count Jazlyn dyed in Daybreak Gradients.

Speedy shoppers! (grab bag update)

That's the medium grab bags all gone.  Just the small ones left!

Lots of new Ltd amount items on the website

Right, the promised grab bags are finally up on the site.  They're made up from test dyed pieces of fabric, colour experiements and a few slight seconds.  There are two sizes small, which have 4 pieces of 9x12 evenweave/linen in them and medium, which has 7 pieces of 9x12 linen/evenweave.  I took a photo of all the fabrics before I packed them up.

 I have also added 4 oddments, one of which I'm in love with and so nearly didn't make it as far as the website.  They're a mixture of sizes and colours and fabric types.  This is what they look like.

Have a great weekend whatever you're planning on doing :-)

Another WiP

This one is courtesy of Cathy.  It is her WiP of Terra Fairy Sprite charted by HAED from original artwork of Brigid Ashwood.  This design is one of the freebie SAL charts for 2011 from the HAED Yuku forum.  Cathy is stitching it on 18 count aida in Dawnblush. 

Tomorrow I've got a few more oddments to add to the website.  I've been playing about with some odd sized fabric cuts I had.  I'll pop pictures and links up here when they're done.  I should also have the grab bags sorted out tomorrow (hopefully!).

Starburst Fabrics are now available

I've just added 'Starburst' as two colour options in the colour gradients section of the website.  I've added a grey version and a blue one.  Both of which are designed to replace the bleached background of Lavender and Lace's Firefly Fairies.  The effect is different from a bleached fabric, but I like the way that they have come out. 

I will be adding more colour options, a blue/green one will appear at some point for mermaids.  As these fabrics have a focal point they need to be ordered to the design size you want rather than cut down from a standard cut.  So if you're interested in them in any colour combination please email me.

 The two following pictures are photographs (so slightly dark) of the greys showing the full fabric cut (one 18 count aida and 1 22 count hardanger).  The actual colour is the colour of the above scan

20 count aida and 22 count hardanger...

are now available in all hand dyed colours.  I've also added them to the solid colours section if you need undyed cuts for a project.


In the next few days I'm going to be adding a few colour submenus in the hand dyed fabrics section so it should be a little easier to find a specific colour if you don't want to go through the whole range (as it's getting quite large!)

A WIP picture for you to drool over

Karen sent me a lovely email this morning with a picture of her Wisteria Garden (Chatelaine) part 1 WiP attached.  She is stitching it on one of last months ltd ed colours, peppermint cream in 28 count Jazlyn.  I love the way it's looking and I can't wait to see more of it when part 2 is released.

Happy New Year!

A huge lack of posts from me in December, sorry about that.  I had a nice long snowy break in Devon at my parents.  I've got a couple of new fabrics for you to look at today, the first is the new LTD fabric for January.  The second is an addition to the sorbet line, this one is lemon sorbet.

I haven't forgotten the grab bags I was going to add to the site.  Keep an eye out for them this month.  I decided as I was going to be away so much of December to hold off releasing them until this month.

I have a couple of new fabrics that will be available on the site shortly as well.  I have ordered some 22 count hardanger (so that will give two 22 count fabrics available) and some 20 count aida.  Both of these have been requested by customers.   I'll let you know when they're in stock and the grab bags are available.