Tag Archives: handmade

Marching On

What’s that? I can’t hear you. La la la la la. It is definitely not March already. No way no how.

So then, do you think it’s too late to do a Christmas recap? Well too bad. I never did quite get around to showing off our crafting efforts for Christmas 2008, which is very sad, considering the effort that we (and particularly Dermot, since I was all broken-wristed and what have you) went to. Christmas, it goes without saying, came hand-in-hand with a little bit of family drama. Gift-making and giving became the subject of argument, so I was left feeling a bit flat about the effort we had gone to. Que sera sera. I’m over it now. Much of the enjoyment is in the making anyway, I find. And I did offer to keep the gifts we had made for the prime grumbler, but that offer was (strangely) refused!

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Our ‘theme’, if you like, for Xmas 2008 was ‘Paper’. We put together a bunch of photo albums – these are Japanese stab bound, just like the album I made for Nichola.

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These are A5 sized…

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With black album pages…

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And glassine interleaves…

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We also put together some smaller notebooks, more conventionally hard-bound…

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Pretty pretty on the inside…

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And some more…

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And I found that Gocco-ing is not so difficult with only one hand…

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So I printed up a bunch of these notecards (graphics are from, um… Clipart.com, I think)…

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And my favouritist thing of all, some lovely bookplates (some were blank like these, others had names already printed on)…

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Finally, we printed up these Mibo calendars (freebie found via Steph) and had them bound at Officeworks. I love the graphics on these, not sure why we didn’t do ourselves one…

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Whew! When all of that was done (in the two short weeks before Christmas, mostly), some of us were plum tuckered out…

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(Not that she had much to do with the crafting, mind you. Perhaps she just grew tired of waiting for Mum and Dad to pay her some attention!)

When all of this was in the planning stages, and there were two wholly-limbed adults going to be taking part, it all sounded good. When a good slab of the cutting and binding came down to Dermot after the chair incident however, I don’t think he was so impressed. I heard a lot of ‘I told you that you should get started earlier’, I can tell you 🙂 . I’ve promised that 2009 will be my year to do all the work… so I’d better get started, hey?

Behold

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My first ever proper grown-up needleroll! With hemstitch and a French seam and everything 🙂 Okay, so the hemstitch needs work, and I stuffed up my French seam slightly (even though I know how to do that). But still, it came out pretty spiffy, if I do say so myself.

I stitched this for Karen after she was let down in “Melanie’s exchange”. It’s stitched with one of my hand-dyes, delica beads to match, and some plain ol’ dmc greens. This is a free design – Victorian Silk Needleroll by Liz Navickas, and you can find it on Kreinik’s site, here. It was loads of fun to stitch. I was so unsure about the colours I chose, but they grew and grew on me as I was stitching… so much that I almost wanted to keep it for myself! I may stitch it again some time.