I Made This!

[the_other_sandy]

Some of you may remember my occasional posts about cross stitching. I'm sure you think I'm making it all up at this point because I haven't finished a project in something like 8 years, including the project I started and posted about 2 years ago. But now I've actually made something! I even made two somethings!

I was highly motivated. For those who don't know, I'm a librarian. Our craft book collection isn't circulating like it used to, so the staff was issued a (completely voluntary) challenge last August to pick a craft book out of our collection and make something from it. The resulting craft item would then be put on display along with a color photocopy of the cover of the book the craft came from so that patrons would know that they could make whatever-it-is too.

I needed to pick something small because I am the slowest stitcher in the entire world, so I poured through our cross stitch pattern books, of which we have about a third of what we used to, and picked this from 501 Cross Stitch Designs by Sam Hawkins:



But it wasn't until after I'd bought the supplies and started on the design that I noticed the copyright date on the book was 1993. I thought I should probably promote a newer book, so I did a catalog search for cross stitch pattern books and discovered we hadn't bought a new one in 4 years (and started to see why maybe our craft book collection isn't circulating like it used to). I hit up the selector in charge of that collection and got her to buy about half a dozen new books.

Most of the new books had some really cool designs in them, but I needed something small again (seriously, slowest stitcher in the entire world). Fortunately one of the books was right up my street and I made this from Makoto's Cross-Stitch Super Collection by Makoto Oozu:



Both are now being framed. The display goes up next Tuesday and will run through the end of November. Meanwhile, now that I don't have a deadline anymore and have rediscovered how much I enjoy doing this, I have 3 more patterns that I photocopied from the new cross stitch books. Of course, I also have 4 or 5 projects in various stages of completion in my closet, so maybe I ought to work on one of those, since I already have the supplies for them and don't need to buy anything.

Comments

[bookwurm.livejournal.com]

Oh, those are cute! I'm going to recommend the second book to our selector if we don't already have it. Thanks for sharing the pictures!

[bookwurm.livejournal.com]

Um, yeah, we supposedly have one book from 2006, but it's missing. Everything else on cross-stitch is even older, and either a heck of a lot of our craft books are missing, or that's one of the areas that had problems during inventory. :P I'm definitely tossing this to our selector.

[the-other-sandy.livejournal.com]

Makoto's Cross-Stitch Super Collection had a ton of really cute little designs in it. It had a page of dinosaurs and volcanoes, one of world landmarks (teeny tiny Arc de Triomphe and Big Ben), one of fish, one of space stuff, and one of Japanese items (teeny Mt. Fuji, sumo wrestler, bonsai tree, etc.), among others. It even had a dinosaur design done in red and blue and intended to work with 3-D glasses (don't know if it actually does, but I'd love to try it someday).

[samazon13.livejournal.com]

Very cool! Congratulations on finishing a project. This is not something I can celebrate very often, either. :)

[the-other-sandy.livejournal.com]

I'm starting to see why I never bother finishing anything--framing is insanely expensive these days!