Thursday, February 26, 2009

Ornamentification

Cross stitching is my passion. I can cross stitch my ass off. I just love those wonderful little Xs that create a picture. I can't help it. If heroin is Nikki Sixx's true love then cross stitch is mine.

Every year my friends
Sharon, Siobhan and I stitch ornaments for each other. This is the ornament I stitched for Sharon this year:


It's a Prairie Schooler Santa and I know she loves cardinals but what I couldn't remember was if she had already stitched this for herself if she recieved it in a swap from another person, but I loved this and decided to just risk her having duplicates. The backing fabric is plaid homespun in the background. I cut them out and sewed them together, when I went to put the ornament right side out, this is what I saw:




Whoops! How did I do that? I was sure that the ribbon for the hanger was away from the edges.
Apparently not.


This is not exactly the look I was going for.
I take out my seam ripper and rip the seams near the ribbon and somehow I end up with this:



Major, big time mistake. That seam ripper was not messing around. I had no idea it was that sharp.
I thought about ripping the seams one more time but I had already snipped away the excess fabric and my linen was raveling like you would not believe. No way was I going to risk ruining the stitching because so far that's the best part. What could I do?




THIS! How cool is that, I sewed the ribbon together, hid my error behind a cute Christmas tree and no one is the wiser. Ok well I'm sure Sharon will notice but hopefully she will know all the love and friendship I put into this ornament and forgive me my lack of skilz.





The whip stitching at the bottom always gives me fits. How does anyone manage to do this and make it nice? Mine looks like a freakin' mess. I tried sewing this closed three different times. This was the best of the attempts.







This is Santa and the Cardinals all finished. The wind was blowing pretty hard when I was trying to take this picture but the flaws aren't that obvious are they? I hope Sharon likes it.
See, anyone can make an rectangle. My friend Linette told me once that any moron could sew a straight line. She obviously had never run across my kind of moron in her sewing adventures.






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