A Fresh Craft Update for the New Year

There has been a massive revival of the craft spirit in our household in recent months. Like my renewal of interest in cross stitching, he has resumed his model building hobby. This has resulted in several Saturday trips to craft stores, and I’ve even resumed my efforts to frame many of the pictures we’ve had sitting around the house in tubes for the last several years.

And because there’s been such a mad flurry of craft activity of late, I can’t believe it’s been almost a year since I talked about my craft projects. I felt certain I had written in October, but my last blog post is dated February of 2025 – so we simply must fix that!

First, a quick update on where I left off with a few of my mostly finished projects at the end of my last post. I’m pleased to say that the Art of Tea cross stitch has reached its final home. The friend I made it for recently moved into a new house and, apparently, the Art of Tea cross stitch has received pride of place in the coffee nook.

I have been sadly lax about getting the rest of my finished projects out the door. But in fairness, Canada Post did spent a significant amount of the end of 2025 on strike, and the last thing I want is for something I worked so hard on to end up lost in the shuffle. But I do have lots of details to relate. (So many, I’m afraid we might need two blog posts to cover it all.) So let’s dig in, shall we?

The Epic Dragon

When last we left off, this dragon awaited beading. I had never done serious bead work on a cross stitch before tackling this project. I have a wolf cross stitch that has three beads attached to it, but that hardly compares.

The first thing I learned about putting beads on a cross stitch is that the beads provided with the kit came in a lot of different sizes and shapes. Which meant I either needed to source my own, higher-quality beads (possibly for future projects) or I needed to search through the pile to find beads of roughly the same shape. Which is what I did.

I was a little fanatic about the size of the beads and where I placed them. Probably way more than I had to be. But I wanted all of the beads in a certain area to be roughly the same shape so they would look uniform. The sole exception was the beads on the head and tail. I used thicker beads near the center of the body and thinner beads near the ends so it would look as if they tapered.

I also reserved bluer beads and more purple beads for different body segments, even though they were packaged together. And I’m not sure if it comes through in the pictures, but it did please the perfectionist in me.

To finish her off, I chose a gold-brushed frame with a white mat board. I had to widen the mat slightly (my first attempt at cutting one) so no details would be lost. And I also learned about blocking (stretching the canvas across a foam board so that the tension gets rid of the wrinkles). But she looks pretty snazzy! The finishing touch is a small sprinkle of golden dragon stickers adorning the mat.

Owls of the Seasons

When last I wrote about craft projects, 3 of my 4 pack of owls were finished. My favorite thing about this little pack of owls, aside from the fact that they’re so cute, is that each one seems to correspond with a season. We’ve decided that the pirate owl (everyone’s favorite) is probably summer. The others are more obvious. (Scarf for winter, flowers for spring, leaves for fall.)

Autumn owl was the last to be stitched. And by the time I reached that one, I was pretty old hat at how the owls came together. So it felt like I finished in no time. It helped that each of these patterns was small and simple, so they didn’t need a lot of fiddly details to finish.

I considered added extra detail stitching on top of each of these, since each only had small segments of back stitching. But in the end, I decided to leave the patterns as they were originally presented – and I think they’re all perfect.

At the time of this writing, these fellows are waiting to be shipped to their final destination for two reasons. The first is the aforementioned Canada Post strike. But the second is that the same recipient is getting a model from my husband, so we plan to ship all of the goodies at the same time.

Space T-Rex

As I mentioned during my last post, I was super excited to try this pattern. It was my first time attempting to craft a pattern without a kit. For those unfamiliar, cross stitch kits usually come with everything you need to finish a project, including all of the thread and a properly sized canvas.

To work without a kit, I had to source thread and canvas on my own. I ended up deciding to buy a massive pack of colors instead of buying only the colors specific to my patterns. For one, it was cheaper. But for another, it’s been more fun. Because part of the process is looking at all the wonderful options I have available and trying to find the best match.

It’s also useful in case I don’t like one of the colors a pattern calls for; I have lots of alternatives.

For the Space T-Rex, I followed the pattern pretty closely. The only change I made was to the dinosaur’s color. The pattern called for a blue t-rex. I made a green one to match the color of my friend’s avatar. As a result, I also put the pattern on a dark blue canvas instead of a black one, and I’m more than pleased with the results.

Pooh and Friends

I wasn’t sure of the size of the Space T-Rex pattern when I started it. So I ended up buying two patterns for my friend Flanny. The second one features Pooh, Tigger and Eeyore sitting together beneath a field of stars.

I made some heavy modifications to this pattern. The original was mostly just the outline of the characters, with a few half-stitches providing color. But I wanted to fully color the characters, so I used the outlines as a guide.

This pattern provided a fair number of challenges. Remember what I said about swapping colors if the need arose? I probably chose too dark a blue for Eeyore. In retrospect, I should have used the lighter color for his base and the darker color for shading (instead of using a light color to indicate moon glow, as I ended up doing).

As a result of Eeorye’s dark color, the details for his hair just did not stand out. I tried using a lighter color, again to evoke moon glow, but I hated how it looked. So I ended up ripping out Eeyore’s hair and making it a lighter grey. This was way easier than changing the body color, which used considerably more thread.

I’m not going to lie, it was a pain. The thread often frayed when I pulled free the stitches, partly because there were so many other details woven nearby. And I had to partly rip out the back stitching in order to replace the color underneath.

But the results were so spectacular, I can’t complain! I love how this turned out, and I hope my friend loves it as well. I’ll be shipping these to him in the new year.

Glizzy Guy

Ironically, this was the first Etsy pattern I actually decided to buy. But it disappeared for awhile, so it got knocked farther down my queue. When it reappeared, I knew I had to grab it for my friend Joe, whose entire stream is themed around hot dogs.

I didn’t make any changes to this pattern, so there’s not much to say about it. Crafting it was smooth sailing. Aside from the fact that I forgot to check if the pattern was wider or longer when I started it. Luckily, I realized I had my canvas oriented the wrong way halfway through the first thread, so I didn’t have to re-do much.

I adore how this turned out, and I think it’s eventual owner is going to love it too.

As I anticipated, we’re only about halfway through my mass of craft updates, so I’m going to leave off here – for now. But I’ve got lots more exciting craft news to share next time!