Feeling better

Well, a bit - enough to do a little bit of stitching, anyway. Over the past week I've taken all the cross-stitch and Bead & Button magazines which were getting out of control, and made myself a nice little archive of all the patterns I liked. I now have folders like "must-stitch" (currently at 26 projects and that's not counting any kits and charts I've bought!), "big project maybes", "small motifs" and so on, though I need to get another folder for all the jewellery projects! I very much doubt I'll get to do many of those in the near future as I really haven't mastered peyote stitch beading and that's the basis to a lot of them. Still nice for inspiration, though. It was SUPPOSED to save me space by getting rid of the magazines, but filing them all neatly takes up just as much!

I did a little stitching last night and am currently awaiting some sweet little buttons from Debbie Cripps' website to finish it off. It's a vest-top for K; it's crisp white in size 3-4 and it was just begging for a nice hand-stitched detail. I found a wee bunch of flowers using these buttons in an old issue of CrossStitcher and modified it a little - I've actually used some DMC linen thread for the leaves and stems which looks and feels very nice indeed. Can't wait to get the buttons now...K has already decided that it's "pitty!".

I'd never been to this website before and it really is a bit of a treasure trove - not much in the way of cross-stitch, but full of inspiriational bits and pieces. I've bought some Shishas which will look brilliant on a bag, jeans or t-shirt for K, and a couple of little books - one about Shishas and Sadi Thread embroidery (Sadi thread is coiled metal thread which you couch into place as a surface decoration - she sells that too), and one about Ribbon Embroidery, which I've always wanted to have a go at. So more strings to my crafty bow soon, hopefully!

I think I will do a bit of Geisha tonight. Oh, and I have successfully folded a paper plane but failed at a butterfly. I have lots of nice coloured paper to play with now, though! I always seem to fail at the last fold - this is nice book but I wish they'd done the examples all in duo-paper so you could see the pictures more clearly.