A Stitch in Time....

Helloooooo
It's a lovely sunny morning - but my word!  it's a chilly one.  I know that just by going as far as the doorstep to fetch the milk in.  Yes, I'm happy to say that we do still have a milkman delivering our daily pinta, and other bits and bobs right to the doorstep.

As usual on a Friday its Daring Cardmakers Day and.....

It's Nat here bringing you my first dare of 2017!
STITCH IT!
This week I am hoping that you'll be raiding your sewing box or dragging your sewing machine out because I want you to feature stitching on your cards as a real eye-catching element!
You can do some good old hand-stitching with embroidery floss and a needle, machine sewing or even feature dies and stamps that do the stitching for you, or why not draw your own stitched designs by hand?

 After several false starts, and a few ideas that bit the dust when I realised I didn't actually have the things I'd need to make it, I came up with another plan - and even this one faltered a couple of times (at least)

First difficulty was getting the printing right - I needed to print on both sides of the card - once for the 'right' side, with only the gold lettering visible, and 
then mirrored in the same place on the reverse.  I didn't want the LOVE lettering to print on the front, but needed them as a guided for my stitching.  Obviously they needed to be mirrored for the stitched letters to be the right way round on the front
That took about 4 tries to get right, and I breathed a sigh of relief when finally I got it sorted......
...... Only to discover that there was no red at all in my meagre cache of embroidery floss - yes I probably should have checked that first, I know!
 I dug out and had a rummage through the box of fibres and tried a rather woolly one out but that looked a mess tbh.
I tried sewing through narrow ribbon to form the words, it looked horrendous.
Eventually I found a reel of red sparkly thread - a bit thin, and the sort that tangles itself up in a heartbeat, but beggars can't be choosers.

By this time my perfectly printed card was a crumpled, holey mess, so I had to go through the complicated printing job again!

So eventually got it done.  As the thread is thin I used four strands, and went over all the stitch lines twice.  I kept the number of holes to an absolute minimum. On the printed reverse there is an 'O', but I converted this to a heart shape when I added the stitching.

 Info

Textured creamy-white card for card base and stitched panel

Red Bazzill card

Gold Glitter card

Sentiment pc generated

Red thread with red lurex strand in it

Narrow red ribbon (The Ribbon Girl).

In the end it came out quite well and it looks way to simple to have caused me so much stress and frustration!  Funny how often that happens, isn't it?  Even funnier is the fact that me challenge to try something new gave Nat the same sort of tribulations that her challenge this week has given me.  So I suppose there's some justice in that, eh?

That's all for this time, I hope your Friday is a good one - and maybe you'll find time to join in with us over at The Daring Cardmakers this time ;)

Please leave a message, its always good to know you're not just talking to yourself :)