Tag Archives: heaven and earth designs

Cross Stitch Update: Tsuru Kame

Tsuru Kame
Artwork by: Haruyo Morita
Heaven and Earth Designs

 
Started: December 2018
 
Here’s what it looked like when I posted this last time in August, 2020.
 

Tsuru Kame
Designer: Haruyo Morita
Heaven and Earth Designs
8/18/2020

 
 
Here’s what it looks like now: 
 
Tsuru Kame
Designer: Haruyo Morita
Heaven and Earth Designs
12/21/2020

I’ve been doing about 100 stitches a day for the last few days on this project and I’ve been enjoying it a lot. But now the diagonal is complete and I put it away.

~Happy Stitching!

Melanie

My weekly crafty update

With the new month, I have new things.  But this week saw me enjoying the following:

A Stitch in Time, I got another diagonal done.

A Stitch In Time
Aimee Stewart
Heaven and Earth Designs
25 Count, 1×1
9/5/2020

With my cross stitch, I use the tiny decision app to pick what to work on. This time it chose A Stitch In Time. I love working on this but I need young eyes so I primarily work on it in the morning or early evenings when the light is good.  Once I finish a diagonal then the tiny decision app picks my next project.  Because we started a new month this last week, I got to start a new project. This is a new thing I’m doing.  I have a lot of patterns and kits sitting around waiting for me to do.  By a lot, I mean probably about 65.  Some of them are all kitted up and some of them are not.  Anyway, I was watching something on YouTube and from something someone said, the idea of dying with all these unstitched projects made me sad. For some reason I wasn’t sad if I had a ton of WIPs. I was sad to not have stitched on these projects.  For quilting, and knitting, I can only have so many WIPs going on.  It seems once I have more than a certain number, I get twitchy and anxious.  I don’t know why. I guess my brain can’t take that many WIPs for those kinds of projects.  I realized that this is not the case with cross stitch.  Cross stitch takes forever for me. Mainly because I love big projects like full coverage Heaven and Earth Designs.  One of those working all the time, will take me over 3 years to do. So if I wait until one is done before starting another, it would take forever to get through and stitch all the projects I have.  So I decided it doesn’t matter how many I have going on. I get so much joy stitching on the projects that I love that I decided to start a new project each month.

 

September new start
Too Glam to Give a Damn
14 count, 4×1
9/5/2020

Too Glam to Give a Damn
14 count, 4×1
9/5/2020

For September, my new start is Too Glam to Give a Damn.  Luckily it’s a small one. I picked this in August and took the month to go through my stash, pick fabric and pull floss.  In this case, I also purchased floss from Joanns.  It’s pretty much called for colors with the exception of Kreinik gold. You don’t see it here as I’ve not stitched anything with the gold yet but I could not find Kreinik gold anywhere.  And I didn’t want to buy it from amazon.  So I just used the DMC gold in a skein.  The fabric is mystery fabric. I believe I won this from a giveaway from the Hobbies Up To Here podcast gals a year or so ago.  It’s perfect for this dragon fly.

New Start for October
Ariadne
Heaven and Earth Designs
No details yet
9/5/2020

And on September 1, I asked Siri to pick a number from 1-65 and it picked my October start, Ariadne. I will take the month of September to kit it up.  Because it’s a Heaven and Earth Design and full coverage, it will take a lot of Floss. I believe it’s around 98 colors.  But I will not kit up the whole thing, I’ll just buy the floss I need for the first two diagonals.  Even though I’m only buying floss for the first two diagonals, it’s important I buy all the floss for a particular color.  For example, let’s say I need 3 skeins of DMC 333 (which is a beautiful purple, if my memory is correct), I will buy all 3 skeins now even though I will not need all of the skeins in the first 2 diagonals.  The reason is because I will want to make sure all 3 skeins come from the same dyelot.  I’ve seen a lot of flosstubers (cross stitch channels on YouTube) try to match skeins and then you’ll see a line from where the old skein was next to the new skein.  With DMC, it’s not that big of a problem as long as you are working on the project in the same time frame.  But given that this will probably take me years to complete, I wouldn’t want to grab a skein 10 years from now because even DMC colors change from time to time. Most cross stitch patterns that I’ve seen usually indicate how many skeins you’ll need.  If your pattern does not, then you’ll probably just need 1.

~happy stitching.

Melanie

 

 

Cross Stitch: HAEDs

Tsuru Kame
Artwork by: Haruyo Morita
Heaven and Earth Designs

HAED is Heaven and Earth Designs. Sometimes referred to as HAEDs for the plural version. If you are familiar with HAEDs, you’ll know this is another sort of crazy. Just like how I adore big quilts I enjoy big cross stitch. HAEDs are full coverage projects that can have over 100 different colors. This is the first HAED I ever bought and I bought a paper copy. Later Pattern Keeper came to be and I bought the PDF version so I could add it to PK. I’m still on the first page and probably at the 5th diagonal.  I’m in no rush to finish this project.  I believe I started this in December 2018 when I was up north visiting with family. It’s in a hoop so it was relatively portable.

Tsuru Kame
Designer: Haruyo Morita
Heaven and Earth Designs
8/18/2020

Like my other HAEDs or full coverage pieces I am stitching on the diagonal using the park method.  I have recently stopped doing the waste method because the floss hanging off were driving me a bit insane. ok. Not insane but it wasn’t cute and I didn’t like it. I’m slowly removing the waste floss as I get to them and eventually all the floss left will be parked floss. This is on 25 count, 1×1.
I’ve been using an app on my phone called the Tiny Decisions app. If you watch Flosstube this isn’t new and a bunch of people use this when they don’t have a plan or can’t decide what to do next or want to work on projects at the spur of the moment without having to FEEL like working on it.  Anyway I have 8 started projects and I generally only work on about 4 of them during my rotation. Well I’ve been sad about not working on the others. And was a bit bored with my rotation. I wanted to work on something but didn’t know what.  So I entered all the projects onto my Tiny Decisions app and Tsuru Kame was the first project it selected.  My goal is to work on each project until I finish the diagonal. There are some projects that I don’t actually work on the diagonal so I’ll have to figure out those projects appropriately when I get to them.  But for now, here’s Tsuru Kame with another diagonal done. It took about 3-4 days to get through it.
~Happy Stitching!
Melanie