Magnum Opus – Update 3

Page 7 is now complete! This one was really quick to do, but I had so much else going on that I ended up putting it aside for quite a lot longer than planned. Nevertheless, here it is:

Section 7 Complete!

I’m still really pleased with how this picture is coming together, and I hope I’ll maybe even get it finished before I reach 30, and officially become ‘too old for Pokemon’…

Here’s the big picture of what I’ve done so far.

Pokemon Picture – progress to date

I’m doing it page by page, so it won’t get any wider but there are half a dozen more rows to do downwards. I am also yet to reach my favourite Pokemon – Diglett!

April 2015 – Mini Projects

I have had such a busy April – spring cleaning, attending concerts, new clients at work and effectively re-learning to drive – that I have had hardly any time to stitch or craft for myself at all. I have experimented in the kitchen a little with some new recipes, and had equal parts success and catastrophic failure (don’t mention the rock solid flapjacks, for example), but very little to show for myself on the stitching front.

I’ve been stitching cover kits and tiny projects in my little gaps of free time though, as well as plodding on with my Magnum Opus, which will be ready for an update soon I think. Here’s a few of the cards I’ve made up for birthdays and so on in May (click for bigger)

Vintage flowers, stitched many years ago by my Grandmother and salvaged for this card

‘Strawberry Tea’ cover kit

‘Floral Heart’ – a cover kit found in an old stash box

‘Apples’ card – from an incredibly old sewing magazine whose cover has been long lost

The apples card will be for Father’s Day, as it reminds me of the smell of my Grandad’s house – he used to make his own cider in the garage, and had an apple tree in the back garden which I would often climb as a child. My Nan still makes delicious cinnamon crumbles from those apples!

I’ve gone a bit overboard with ribbons and bows and thrown on a few sequins for good measure, as there is no such thing as too much sparkle on a card…Probably.

Stash Inheritance

Since a lot of my friends and family know that I am an avid stitcher, I tend to get quite a lot of miscellaneous stash handed down to me, with people saying ‘oh, my Nan/Aunt/Sister/Whoever doesn’t sew any more, can you use this?’ The answer is always a resounding ‘YES!’ because who in their right mind would say no to freebies?

A week ago, I acquired the mother-lode of stranded cotton stash:

Hundreds upon hundreds of colours!

Naturally, being a total neat freak and spreadsheet junkie, I immediately set about sorting, cleaning, de-tangling and organising. Look at how pretty they look all tidy and on bobbins!

The DMC threads sorted on bobbins

However, I really started to struggle after I had separated out all of the modern threads. I was left with some Anchor / Clark and Co. threads that didn’t correspond to any numbered list I could find, even after hours scouring the internet for some sort of conversion list. They look like this –

Old Anchor threads – closeup

In the end, I took a long shot and emailed Coats Crafts, who now own and make Anchor threads, seeking advice directly from the source. Amazingly, I received a response in less than 24 hours including a PDF converting all the old Anchor thread numbers into the new ones, which I shall include here, because I was totally unable to find it anywhere else online: Anchor Stranded Cotton numbers Old To New. I was so pleased with how helpful they were. They also included information on how to make these old threads colour safe for washing. and advice about their care.

I had run out of bobbins and boxes on the other major brands of thread by this point, but eager to complete my new filing and storage system, I grabbed some cigarette card holders from Robin Hood Direct on Amazon and filled a binder with the old Anchor threads, like so:

Binder filled with sorted threads in colour number order

Alongside this, I have completed a spreadsheet detailing what threads of each brand I have, how they correspond to each other, and in what box or binder they are each stored – because I am a massive nerd, apparently! I totally love how the binder looks, all filled with bright colours, and it really helps keep the threads clean and tidy, which is especially important given their age. I now want to transfer all my collection into binders, because it looks great and takes up so little space compared to the enormous bobbin boxes, which I now have 7 of!