Quiet...but busy

I've not posted so far this week but I've not been idle. This is a stitchy post, so to start with, here is the update on the Kili stitch

For those of you who have seen my other stitches, you will know that I have done a couple of photo stitches, by buying kits. For this one, I decided to utilise a free online program called moulinella. As you can see. it worked really well. You may have to tweek it a little to get the pattern exactly how you want, but once you do it tells you what shades you need, and how many stitches of each shade. Brilliant.

I've also started working on the christmas presents, which is why I've waited until now to put a post up. The first part of each persons present is a cross stitch piece. I bought some bezels a while back and decided to use those, to make keyrings and necklaces. So you are limited to an extremely small amount of stitches, depending on what your aida count is. For those of you who don't know, your aida count is how many stitches there will be along an inch of fabric. So for example, a 14 count aida has 14 stitches to the inch. As the pendants were only an inch long I used a higher count, 25. 

Then I had to decide on what to stitch! Very hard to find the right things but in the end I used some patterns from some magazines in my stash, some free patterns online (always thankful to the people who share their work) and even moulinella for one of them. Once they were stitched, I cut out some card (don't use chipboard as it's too thick) to the right size, cut the aida to fit (with a small edging) then glued it onto the card. The way you do this (is very messy) is by folding the edging around bit by bit and holding it till it sticks. Then you glue it to the pendant, and, once dry, use jump rings to attach it to key rings or necklaces.

As you can see, some are better than others, as I got more confident the more I did. I'm pleased with them though. Definitely have a few faves, can you guess which ones?

Spending wise, I bought The Miniaturist by Jessie Burton for £3.99, took my little brother to Franky and Bennys (two meals and two pepsi's for £19.20) bought some cat food, pizza, donuts, and cloudy lemonade for £8.28. I also partook of Ben and Jerrys free icecream on Tuesday, and used my cinema giftcard to buy two tickets to the new Avengers film next week.

I've set myself a challenge starting tomorrow, to write 500 words a day. The whole Lonely As A Cloud campaign gave me serious writers block which is down to one thing; fear. And the only thing that can defeat that fear is me. So from tomorrow for 100 days, I'm writing a little each and every day.

Onto the tasks

1. Starry night stitch (DONE)

2. Project book (DONE)

3. Complete book plans (little progress)

4. Read and review 100 books (61/100)

5. Make 14 christmas presents (woah we're halfway there)

6. Make 11 birthday presents (1 more to go)

7. Make calendar, box and tags (no progress)

8. Hit minimum savings target (33%)

9. Kili cross stitch (4/9 completed)

10. 50,000 words (challenge starts tomorrow)

Happy crafting

Ems