Free Pattern Friday: Be Mine

Hello readers!  It's Friday, which means it's time once again for me to share a free cross stitch pattern with you.

But first, you may be wondering where I've disappeared off to for the past couple weeks?  Although I managed to keep up with my Crazy January stitching through January 24th, it was getting harder and harder due to a flare up in some carpal tunnel like symptoms in my hands.  So finally on January 25th I decided I needed to take a break and slow the stitching way down rather than risk damaging something so I would need more invasive medical attention.

I'm still planning on doing starts for Days 25-31, they're just going to have to wait a little longer.  Maybe I might be able to pull some out for this weekend.  I know I need to catch up in my reporting of what I did get done before I had to take a break, but sadly, typing imitates the movements that make it hard to stitch, so I've had to cut back on the blogging as well.

Anyway, in the meantime, I can take a quick bit to share a new free cross stitch pattern with you.  We all know Valentine's Day is fast approaching, and although I'm not a big fan of that holiday, I do love kittys, so I found this adorable kitty couple pattern that I can manage to stomach for Valentine's Day.

This pattern comes to you courtesy of Alita Designs, who did one of the snowman patterns I showed a few weeks back.  It's the perfect size for a card or small token that you can easily whip up between now and the big day.  You can download this free cross stitch pattern directly from the designer's website.

Happy stitching!





If you ever come across one of my posts that contains a chart that breaks copyright law, please email me and let me know right away. In picking and posting my free cross stitch pattern posts, I make every effort to ensure the designs I share are legitimately free charts.

Free Pattern Friday: Snow Couple

Welcome to another edition of Free Pattern Friday!  Today's free cross stitch pattern continues January's theme of snowmen, but as it's the last Friday in January, it also gives a nod to the upcoming February holidays as well. 

This cute little snowman couple and filigree heart is from the German blog Kissy-Cross.  It's a nice size pattern without a lot of color changes, which means it's something you could whip up really quickly for a gift or ornament.  I bet the filigree heart border would look really cool in an over dyed or variegated thread as well. 

You can get this free cross stitch pattern in graphic format from the designers blog. 

Happy stitching!





If you ever come across one of my posts that contains a chart that breaks copyright law, please email me and let me know right away. In picking and posting my free cross stitch pattern posts, I make every effort to ensure the designs I share are legitimately free charts.

Free Pattern Friday: Bashful Bunnies and Snowman

Welcome to another edition of Free Pattern Friday, where I share a free cross stitch pattern link with you (mostly) every Friday!

Have you ever heard of Designs by Gloria and Pat?  They were more popular a few years ago, but these are the publishers of the Precious Moments, Cherished Teddies, and Playful Kittens patterns, as well as artists like Dianna Marcum's work in cross stitch.  Most of their chart books are out of print or harder to find now, but the good news is that they've gone digital.  In addition to offering a lot of their chart books as PDF downloads now, they also have a lot of freebie patterns for you to download and try.

Continuing with our snowman theme, this week's pattern I'm sharing is one from the Bashful Bunnies line of patterns they offer.  It features a cute little bunny building a snowman buddy.  For those who've never done one of the Gloria & Pat patterns before, this is a good one to practice with.  They do usually have several fractional stitches with lots of backstitch, something I would call more "old style" than a lot of the minimalist patterns that are available and popular now.  But I think the designs are cute anyway, so I will definitely be trying this bunny.

You can download this cute free cross stitch pattern in PDF format from the Gloria and Pat website. 

Happy stitching!





If you ever come across one of my posts that contains a chart that breaks copyright law, please email me and let me know right away. In picking and posting my free cross stitch pattern posts, I make every effort to ensure the designs I share are legitimately free charts.

Progress Update: Crazy January Challenge Days 15-18

Well, I hope everyone had a good weekend, and those off in the US had a good 3 day holiday.  It was nice to rest and relax for most of the weekend.  Luckily my cold hasn't blown into full on sick mode yet, but I definitely am still feeling off my game.  Monday I had a visit to my thyroid specialist for my monthly checkup and apparently the radioactive treatment I had in October has finally taken full effect.  So my sick symptoms could be caused by the fact that I am now officially hypothyroid.  I'm going on a new medicine for that starting tomorrow, so hopefully that will help bring me back up to feeling better in the next few weeks.

In other news, my brother made it to Florida okay and has now completed his first few days of working at Walt Disney World.  Yay!  So proud of him. If anyone would like to read his adventures about working as a Walt Disney World cast member, he has his own blog here.

But now onto stitching.

Things were slow on the January Challenge side of things, mostly because I got far enough into Swirly Lollipop that I wanted to hurry up and finish it.  So ta-da!  It's now done:

This is a chart from Dailycrossstitch.com and was done on 14 count white aida with the charted DMC threads.  I did modify a few of the stripes slightly and I made the lollipop stick only 1 row instead of two because I thought it looked better.  This is a project stitched for WOCS (World of Charity Stitching) and was started on January 3rd and finished on January 17 of this year.

Friday I decided I wanted to start something new since I have a bit more extra time on the weekends instead of working on a WIP.  So I pulled out this piece of fabric for a project I'm calling Butterfly Sampler:

As you can see I only got a stripe of 1 color of 45 stitches in.  By the time I tracked down and pulled all the colors, I was pretty tired from the long week and ready to go to bed.  This is a series of 4 freebie butterfly charts by Durene Jones that I'm stitching together as one piece.  I think it will look really neat when it's done.

Saturday was another new start.  This is Homegrown Melons from an old copy of the (US) magazine The Cross Stitcher.  Sadly, I'm not sure who the designer is.

My plan is to frame it and gift it to my mother, since watermelons were a large theme in our kitchen and house when I was growing up.  Right now I just have a few stripes of a pink blob, but I actually didn't want to work on this one too much because I ended up working on it when we got together to watch a movie Saturday night.

My project for Sunday was also a new start (noticing a theme?).  This is Britty Kitty stocking by Brittercup Designs.  I've gotten the crazy idea in my head to attempt to stitch stockings for my family over the next year, and these is the one I've chosen for myself.  I spent most of my stitching time on Sunday finishing up Swirly Lollipop so this actually didn't get much attention, but I got two rows of a tree branch done.

Monday's project was also a stocking; this one is called Tate's Stocking and is done by Raise the Roof Designs.  It's originally charted on a 20 count linen from Weeks Dye Works, but I don't particularly like working on linen because of the uneven weaving and slubs, so I swapped it out for a sparkle evenweave instead.  I then spent like 30 minutes (no kidding) on trying to decide to do it over 1 or 2 threads.  If over 1 thread, it will be slightly smaller than the other stockings I'm doing, but if over 2 it will be much, much bigger than the other stockings.  So in the end I decided to stitch it over 1 and just have this one turn out a little smaller.  I'm probably going to get flak for it later on from the person I'm giving it to, but oh well.  After all that time debating, I only had the energy to make the barest of starts on it:

After that I needed some mindless stitching, so since Swirly Lollipop is now done I moved onto Sweets for the Sweet for a bit more progress on the lettering.  That turned out to be a good thing because most of the night was spent stitching while having a massive discussion/argument with my aunt about getting scholarships for college and so the mindless stitching was nice to not have to think too much about:

Not sure what today's project will be yet.  Honestly, I was still pretty tired from being sick/not sick/whatever all weekend, so I didn't plan the rest of the challenge out all the way like I was thinking I might.  So we'll see what I pull out of the WIP or new pile when I get home tonight and see. 

Progress Update: Crazy January Challenge Days 11-14

Despite my best intentions, this is the first opportunity I've had to come on and do a Crazy January Challenge update since Monday.  Somehow I find myself getting sick (again!) and combined with a very busy week at work again, it's really slowed me down.  Bleh. 

But enough complaining.  Let's talk about funner things.  Here's a recap of what my challenge progress is.

January 11th, Monday, I did decide to pull out another WIP project rather than start something new.  I decided it was time to work a little bit of Sunshine by Satsuma Street, since it hadn't seen any love for awhile and is actually pretty close to being finished.  So I pulled it out and took it from here:

To here:

Not too much left to go on this one, so I should be able to wrap this one up pretty quickly soon, although maybe after January and the challenge is over. 

Tuesday night I started a new project.  This is Lizzie Kate's Autumn Alphabet, which I sent out this week as the start of a new Lizzie Kate round robin that my Facebook group is doing.  That's right, I'm pretty much crazy because I signed up for another round robin at the same time.   This one was hard for me to miss though, because I absolutely love Lizzie Kate designs. 

I stitched the middle "M" block on my project so my fellow stitchers have a base point to start their stitching from.  Here's what it looked like when I sent it off:

I'm super excited about this project because it's the first Lizzie Kate chart that I've splurged for the charted Weeks Dye Works and Crescent Colors overdyed threads.  Although you can't really tell with this block because the orange is the one color of DMC in the pattern and the very slight variation in the dark brown hasn't shown up in the small amount of stitching for this letter.  I can't wait to see how it turns out as a whole though.  I plan on doing all 4 in this alphabet series eventually. 

Wednesday I decided that after all the Mill Hill kits I did in December, I was really kind of missing doing the little Mill Hill kits.  So I pulled out Kitty's Stocking and managed to put in one more stripe of color, taking it from this progress last year:

To this:

Not much progress, but hey, progress is progress, right?  I was still in a Mill Hill mood the next night, so Triple Scoop got a little love to take it from where I left it last year:

To this:

Again, not much progress, and in posting this now I see a mistake I need to go back and fix.  But most of my challenge stitching this week was done on lunch breaks, since I've been working on other things during the evening.  Swirly Lollipop has got almost all of its stripes now:

Just the green stripes, white, and the stick to fill in.  I also made a dent in my chosen mandala motif of the Ink Circles piece I'm doing for the sampler round robin for January. 

So that's coming along too.  So what's my plans for the weekend?  Well, I haven't picked my project for today yet, so we'll see what calls to me tonight when I settle in for my nightly stitching session.  Other than that, I want to organize the rest of my potential crazy project pieces and choose which ones I will most likely stitch on during the rest of the month.  Oh, and rest.  Lots of resting.  This getting sick thing is no fun, I tell ya.  : (   Good thing we have a 3 day weekend which gives me more time to recuperate. 

Free Pattern Friday: Snowman Bookmark

Welcome to today's free cross stitch pattern link!  As I said last week, January is going to be full of all sorts of snowmen.  This week's pattern happens to combine two of my favorite things: snowman and bookmark patterns.  In fact, I can say stitch and designing bookmarks is what really got me back into my stitching bug a few years ago after I lost it somewhere around 16 years of age.

This friendly snowman features a vest of stained glass style blues and greens with a jaunty purple scarf, and is offered by English designer Amanda Gregory.  I became familiar with Amanda's designs through a cross stitch forum I stop by from time to time, but her designs have started to get more and more popular lately.  She's popping up again and again in my Cross Stitch Gold magazine with her bright (usually) botanical designs.

You can head over to Amanda's blog to save this bookmark pattern in picture format.  You'll have to scroll down a bit to see it (as of the writing of this post).  There's also a matching biscornu pattern featuring this same snowman if that's more your thing.  Either choice is a great free cross stitch pattern!

Happy stitching!





If you ever come across one of my posts that contains a chart that breaks copyright law, please email me and let me know right away. In picking and posting my free cross stitch pattern posts, I make every effort to ensure the designs I share are legitimately free charts.

Progress Update: Crazy January Challenge Days 9-10

Hope everyone had a good weekend.  Mine was actually pretty busy since we spent most of it trying to my brother up and ready for his move to Orlando for his "summer" break for the next three-ish months.   But I still kept up with at least a little stitching for my January challenge, so here's what I worked on. 

Friday night I was feeling pretty dead because we'd had a pretty rough week at work, so I decided rather than go allllllll the way across the room to my work bag and pull out Fa La La, I would just pick up Swirly Lollipop and do a few stitches.  Managed to put a stripe and a half in so now it looks like this:

I had a bit of a mini heart attack moment where I thought I had centered it wrong on the fabric, but after 30 minutes of counting and measuring and recounting I think it's actually okay.  I'm liking the way it's turning out so far. 

Saturday night I decided to pull open the latest sampler round project I had just gotten in the mail.  It's Garden Stars by Ink Circles which if you haven't seen it before, is an absolute HUGE project featuring all sorts of mandala type motifs.  I don't think I correctly internalized just how big this project was when I looked at pictures of it online at the beginning of the of round robin.  I got a nice chunk of the mandala motif I'll be finishing for this round one, I think maybe about 1/6 of the way done?

The colors got bleached out a bit in the picture, but there's all sorts of green used.  The motif I'm working on isn't my favorite green color, but it's interesting to see how it fits in with those around it. 

Sunday (yesterday) I figured perhaps it was time to mix it up a bit since so far I've worked almost exclusively on new starts.  I decided to pull out a WIP project instead, and pulled out one of my oldest, Silent Night by Mill Hill.  This is going to be a gift for a family friend who collects nativities, and originally it was supposed to be given as a Christmas present two years ago, but I just haven't been able to bring myself to work on it lately.  Not sure why since I really enjoyed it through the first 1/2 or so, but I've been bogged down on the top and haven't gotten much progress on it in almost 2 years. 

So I pulled out Silent Night while catching up on Downton Abbey last night and went from this:

To this:

Not much progress, but at least the top is starting to look like something a little more now.  The light bleached out the colors a bit on this picture, they're closer to life in the top picture.  I did get to stitch with my Christmas Ott light, so that was exciting!

Tonight will probably be another WIP project, since I just am not sure I'm in the mood for something new again.  Guess we'll see what tonight brings after work.