Stitchy Retrospective No. 3

This one's a bit rude I'm afraid, but I've airbrushed out the naughty word (albeit badly, with Paint, because I don't have photoshop).


This was for another interweb friend*, who also has quite a dry sense of humour. He's Australian, and his girlfriend is Swedish, so the gave me homemade Anzac biscuits and Swedish gingerbread in exchange for my stitchy skills.






He says he had great fun explaining it to his girlfriend's Swedish aunts when they came to visit: "Yes, c**t means what you think it means but not only that. Yes, yes, lap means 'lick' in this sense too. No, it's not about licking vaginas" :)


*I do have some real life friends too, that I see face to face, honest. Although I did meet a fair few of them on the internet :D

Stitchy Retrospective No. 2

This was for a work colleague - when I was a fancy subject librarian at a university she was my counterpart in the learning technology dept., trying to drag academia into the 21st century (no easy job).

We had a north / south thing going on, and I'd often pull her leg about what a snob she was :) Hence we became Happyshopper Hurt and Waitrose Westerman. I stitched this for her before I left to go on maternity leave, and it sits on her desk. Funniest thing is she's an Essex girl, but you didn't hear that from me, right? ;)

Stitchy retrospective

I used to have a big thing about cross stitch. I think it was the first bit of craft that I tried properly in my early teens, and I used to do lots of little designs, mainly for cards.

While I was pregnant with munckin I got back into it a bit, and amongst other things made four little samplers for friends. They all have their own stories, so I'm going to post one a day with a little tale to accompany it.


This was the first one I did, for a lovely fella called Piers. I know him from a forum I used to frequent whilst whiling away the hours at work in my lunchbreak. He's a likeable chap, if slightly dark. Many of his posts ended with '...it's all baggage' - a true cynic :)


I posted a thread about picture phone recommendations, as I wanted to get a new phone so I could send pictures of munchkin to friends when she was born. Bless his blackened heart, he gave me a spare phone he had kicking around, and didn't want anything in return for it. So I stitched up this sampler for him. If you want to hear just how warped he is, you can tune in to his online radio show on Mondays at 8pm on Purple Radio. Just don't say I didn't warn you.... :)

Hello, Kitty!

Munchkin has very generously passed a cold on to me and mr pickled weasel, and we are both feeling quite sorry for ourselves. My symptoms were at their worst on Thursday, and so Grandma Pickled Weasel came and took Munchkin out for the morning so I could get some sleep and sit in the sun feeling wibbly. I sat and stitched the last bit of a kit I've been doing for a while, a lovely little Hello Kitty which was done on soluble canvas.

I've never used soluble canvas before, but it was easier than I thought. I think the fabric you use it on is quite important, and I chose a nice cotton dress to embroider because I knew it would be easy to stitch on. The kit was fab, came with everything I needed - canvas, threads, chart, instructions and even a needle (excellent, as I am always losing mine. Slightly scary prospect now I have a small child). The only difficult bit was the inclusion of *shiver* FRENCH KNOTS in the design. I hate french knots. Until now! I followed a fabulous tutorial from Sublime Stitching and finally mastered them.

When you finish stitching, you just soak your fabric in hot soapy water for 10 minutes and the canvas disappears. Then you rinse and dry it as normal. It reminded me a bit of leaf gelatine, maybe it is made of a similar thing. I was really pleased with it, and am trying to avoid the temptation of buying another one...