Free dragon cross stitch pattern

Digging through an old back-up I stumbled on a few cross stitch designs I made years ago.  Fortunately, although they were made with PC stitch which I no longer own a copy of, a viewer is still available.  Since I don't want them potentially lost to time, I thought I would gradually work through and rescue these.  And since I have a blog, what better use than posting them here for the world to enjoy?

So without further ado, here's a cute little dragon head I have redone in KG-Chart.  Two chart types, colour and black and white so you can use whatever you prefer.  I have not test stitched this yet or dug my colours out so you may want to use my numbers as just a guide.  Basically you want four shades of green from light to dark (or whatever colour you prefer), a contrasting colour for the neck ridges and a red, white and black for the mouth and eyes.

Free for personal use, just don't steal it, sell it or claim it as your own.  If you find any errors or find anything confusing then let me know and I'll fix them.  And if you make one yourself, take a photo and send it to me- I'd love to see them!  Bonus virtual points if you play with the colours.

Probably the only card posts I will make

There are those that find joy in making cards.  Those who find delight in finding just the right paper.  In stamping or drawing or cutting or punching or brayering or embellishing or [insert any number of other techniques in here].  In adding ribbons or distressing or embossing.  In sort, creating disposable* pieces of artwork to give to another.  I am not one of those people.

Which is odd really, because both my Mum and my sister are.  My mum has a room devoted to craft, 99% is for cardmaking.  The other 1% is all the bits left over from her dabbling in a wide variety of other crafts that I raid when appropriate (why no, I have no idea where I got my crafty genes from :P).  My sister is following in her footsteps with only her smaller budget and three small children to keep her supplies and output smaller.  I'll see if I can convince them to let me show some of their pieces in future posts.

Myself, I just make cards when I need to- which basically translates to when I need to give either Mum or my sister a card for birthdays.  When I'm giving a card to someone else I just go and take a card from their finished boxes.  It has become something of a running gag in my family when I do make a card (once I wrote 'DIY card' on a plain card and enclosed it with the pile of craft supplies I bought Mum for her birthday).  Other times I get lucky and use a card to mount something such as a piece of embroidery such as the embroidered card kit I made a month or so ago.

So basically my point is, this is not going to be a blog that talks about card making a lot.  But yesterday my sister held a Stampin' Up party (for those not in the know this is a company that operates on the party plan model, like Tupperware, and sells card and scrapbook supplies).  So partly to be a supportive sister, partly out of curiosity I went and I made two cards.  So without further ado, here are the only two classic cards I'm likely to post.

The first one I like- it's a nice birthday card that's not terribly kiddy or gender biased.  The Happy Birthday was stamped and then the letters water-coloured in.  The penants were made using a stamp and punch combo that look pretty but would cost $100 to get the set (and since I'm not into making cards, that would work out to a very large cost per card so no, I didn't buy them).  And the paper, ribbon and embellisments are also from the company.

The second card was more of a gift tag and... well let's just say that I made it later in the night and the concentration was well and truely gone.  So after stamping the back, I turned the card over and stamped the front.  Upside down.  So then I tried to fix it by using snowflake stamps. And then the glue splurted out.  And I tried to colour in the stamp with the thick end of a pen.  And... 

 Oh well, perhaps I'll end up using it for a Kris Kringle card or something.  Or bury it deep in a secret location and never speak of it again!

So while I did make one nice card, the party did not convince me that I really would like card making if only I gave it a chance.  And even if I did, the stuff was far too expensive for my tastes (a typical set of rubber stamps was around $40).  While nice quality, that's too rich for my blood.  If I spend that much money on a craft at one time I'd like to see more stuff or know I'll get a lot of use out of the stuff.

Procrastinating Owls

I've finished my uni placements for now but for the next two weeks I've got to try and crank out as many assignments as I can (not to mention look for a job!)  What does that translate to?

Why crafty procrastination, of course*.  I have in fact finished making Talia, pattern available free from Knitty but I havn't had a chance to take a photo of it yet (I thought I'd actually be good and take a photo of me wearing it rather than laid out).  Next in my project queue was Owls (Ravelry link)- a lovely jumper pattern that features a cute row of owls around the neck.  Given that I started it on Tuesday, I'm surprised at just how much I've already done- I'm ready to start the waist increases.



Now to duck back into  my assignments.  Fear not, I have not forgotten my little blog.  I have lots of stuff planned, just need to find the time to do it in!

* For those reading this who either worry about my scholastic endeavors or are potential future employers, fear not.  This post has been written after several productive days- and not just for craft projects!  But feel free to leave a comment to urge me to do more craft!

Mounting miniature embroidery

Another post in the Rose Broach saga...

The story so far.  Several weeks ago I bought a pretty little broach from a market of unknown age.  However it had unfortunate ugly staining on the side, probably old glue going icky.  When cleaning proved unsuccessful I pulled it apart to see if more drastic action would improve things.  With the embroidery removed from it's mounting I could also see what the original pattern colours looked like so made two cross stitch chart variants which you can find here. In this episode, I take the original embroidery and give it a new life...

Here's what I had at the start of today's post- the embroidery that I had cut from the mount and lightly trimmed the worst of the discolouration off. But I could not remount it in the original broach due to the size of the work now being much smaller- there needs to be enough fabric in the mount above to fit around the front of the mount (the domed round metal piece) with edges long enough to be able to tuck underneath and be held by the backing plate.

Solution?  I popped out to my local sewing supply shop and I bought some self covering fabric buttons.  These come in a range of sizes but for this work I used the 28 mm diameter button.  You can see that the materials for these have not exactly changed a lot.  Aside from size the domed pieces look near identical.  Only the backs are different materials.  The red and the yellow things are to help you mount your fabric in place- you'll see more on this later.

Because I wanted to have the embroidery centred on the button I first stitched a running stitch around the edge.  This meant that I could check the pattern was where I wanted it to be as you can see below.

Then it was into the handy red thing designed to hold everything in place (after making this button all I can say is DON'T LOOSE THIS or the rest of your button blanks (they come in a pack of 5) will be next to useless.  The red thing is made of a soft rubber that holds the material snuggly.

Those gathering stitches were handy though as they helped pull the material in from the edge.  I would suggest you do the same even if you have more edge material than I do.

Next step is adding the back- the yellow thing is the handy back holder that lets you press evenly to push the plastic back into the metal front, hopefully catching all the edges of the fabric at the same time.

Back view- sorry about the thread.  I was about to go to the next step before I remembered I hadn't taken photos yet!

Now this could be the finish point if you wish- all I did above was cut the shank of the button off with a craft knife so there would be room to glue a broach pin on.  This step is best done before you start but since I didn't think of it I just improvised and tried not to cut the material.  But the pin looks a little plain...

Front view

My solution?  I stitched seed beads around the edge of the button to frame it.  The great advantage of this method is that you don't have to try and find something the right shape and you can use whatever colours you like!  I choose a silver and black alternative frame as it reminded me of the original old silver backing, but this could look lovely if you picked colours from the roses or leaves or perhaps used pearl coloured beads.  The choice is yours.

Overall verdict?  Well it isn't perfect.  The design goes over the edges a bit so it doesn't have the white border to edge it to really make it pop the way the original had.  However, now you can't see yuck staining either.  The seed beads will also hopefully protect the edges of the pin from wear.  Since the edges are where the fabric will first rip and wear away due to rubbing it will give the embroidery a much longer life (the original pin had places where the fabric beginning to fray in addition to the staining).  And the backing piece will be used as soon as I can decide on what to stitch for it (hmm, same pattern or something else?)   Let's call it a good B+ which can become an A when I utilise the original broach backing.

What do you think?  Find these instructions useful?  Drop me a comment or an email- I would be THRILLED to know others are reading this blog and using the material!

Rose brooch cross stitch pattern

The original piece

Remember that old broach that I pulled apart?  Well I decided that it would be nice to have the pattern in case I damaged the original in my cleaning and deconstruction.  It turned out to be easier said than done- even blowing up the photo it was hard to see the stitching to reverse construct the process.  I also had the drama of finding some software to make the pattern in.  I used to have a copy of  PCStitch but lost the CD in a move.  Since this was for a small, one-off project I did not want to fork out lots of money on another copy so went on the prowl for something else to use.  I made the charts below using KG-Chart for Cross Stitch- they have a light version that is free that lets you create small patterns (for large you need to pay).  Overall I was fairly happy- the only downside was I couldn't seem to easily make a contained digital chart to post with both the symbols/chart AND the colour key.  I ended up having to do a screenshot to make the patterns below.  The screen colours also don't seem quite right for the DMC colours.  You can compare the lighter green colour in the leaves of the broach above and the pattern below to see what I mean- while the threads are a near perfect match, the computer pattern seemed to be a much darker colour.  But that said, the software did the job and was fairly simple to use.

So enough about the process, here's the pattern for you to enjoy.  It is not a perfect copy of the original as the small size and slight variation in colour fading means that it is more of a 'inspired by' pattern.  It also has not been test stitched yet since I'm still doing teaching rounds right now.   However, the colours (I used DMC embroidery floss colours) are as close a match as I can make them.  Click on the pattern below to see the full size version.

But wait!  Those who read my last post will remember that when I pulled it apart we got a glimpse of the original colours when looking at the back.  And as a comparison, here is the same pattern but this time I've matched to the back of the work- the side unaffected by light and wear over goodness knows how long.  Again DMC colours were used.

Much brighter, isn't it?  I also had to add an extra colour because, while the dark colour in the red and orange rose looked the same from the front, they appeared to be different shades from the back.  The green leaves are also noticeable as the lighter shade appeared yellow from the front but was originally a light green.

Now my great decision is what to do with the backing plate- stitch up the pattern above or something different?  And do I use the bright original colours or the muted colours for that vintage feel! Have an opinion?  Drop me a comment below.  I don't do decisions well and can use all the help I can get!

Deconstructing a miniature embroidered broach

Several weeks ago I fell in love with a lovely old broach at a market stall at uni.  So despite the fact that the last thing I should be doing is buying things, it somehow managed to follow me home!  But it had a flaw that irritated me- there was a nasty stain around the edge. It's most noticable near the pink rose but there were a few marks elsewhere.  Close examination showed that it was due to a nasty seeping glue that had discoloured over time.

The broach after I attempted to clean it.  It is about 3 cm in diameter if you are curious.

When I got it home, I tried a few remedies to try and fix it- a gentle wash in warm water with a bit of detergent but no joy.  I then tried getting out the big guns- polar solvents.  This was a big risk- if the colours in the embroidery were not colourfast then I might find them bleeding everywhere and ruining the piece.

While the thread colours happily did not bleed, the stain did not move either.  I suppose I could've left as it was but I decided to take drastic action.  If you have a mint condition broach, I don't recommend the following- this one had already been repaired (the pin on the back was a modern one glued on to replace the original) and had the stain.  But be aware, if you have something with true value DON'T do the following!  I am not an expert- lovers of old things who spend weeks lovingly restoring things would probably be horrified.  I tried to treat the broach with respect but old glues meant that there was a certain lack of finesse in the following.

I decided to see if I could deconstruct the broach to either fix the embroidery if possible, or replace it with something I made myself.  Step one was to pry the backing place (flat metal with the decorative border) off the piece the embroidery was mounted on.  This had been glued down so a certain amount of prying was required.  They came apart fairly easily- the broach pin fell off due to a small amount of flexing, but since this had been glued on much more recently than the rest of the piece I just kept both to glue together again later.

The embroidery was mounted in a metal piece- it's hard to explain well.  The easiest thing is to probably look at the picture below.  An attempt to pry it apart was not successful as it was clear it was going to damage the embroidery so I resorted to using a knife to carefully cut around the fabric.  While this would mean the piece couldn't be remounted in the same broach, I felt it would ultimately cause less damage since it put less stress on the fabric.  Then I could finally separate the broach back- you can see the small dent in back piece.

A part of me wanted to find a signature or a scrap of paper in the back piece. It's a perfect little hollow space that would be awesome to put some tiny message into the future in that may or may not ever be seen again.  Now whether it should've been a posterity message 'this broach made in [insert date here] by me' or something to mess with future person's head 'Now look what you've done!' I'll leave as an interesting thought exercise to the reader.  Sadly there was no identifying marks, either paper or stitched into the border so the creator's identity will forever be a mystery.

Now while this has probably horrified any antique restorer, it has provided a great glimpse into how the piece was made in the first place.  The embroidery was stitched on a piece of off-white silky fabric with a even mesh light chiffon like fabric on top to provide the grid to stitch too.  It also provides a unique chance to see what the original colours are- I was very surprised to see the difference!

Here's what I mean.  Here is a photo of the front of the stitching on a black background.  To provide a colour comparison, I've included three DMC embroidery flosses: 334, 347 and 725 respectively.

And here is the back with the same DMC colours for comparison.

Much brighter, isn't it!  That's the colour that the original embroiderer intended- something bright and cheerful.  As for what I am going to do with a small piece of embroidery and an empty broach, well that's for future blog posts to tell...