Home Made Greetings Cards and a few other things...

Happy Monday morning ... hahahahaha!!!

Well, I hope everyone had a good weekend, lots of chilling out and lots of stitching too!

Yesterday, was Mothering Sunday here in the UK.  It was a perfect time to spoil my mum, who's had it tough over the past year, and yesterday's date was even more difficult given that it would have been my dad's 67th birthday :(

We (me, my fiance, my brother and mum), went up to the cemetery to see dad yesterday afternoon and then went for a meal at one of our favourite pubs.  It was a glorious warm, sunny day yesterday and the evening skies were perfect for stargazing too -- which is cool because Venus and Jupiter are in alignment at the moment and are really bright in the sky.  It also gave my brother the opportunity to show off this fabby app he has on his iPad that shows you the location of stars, planets etc.. just by pointing the iPad at a section of sky (pretty cool).

Anyway, enough of that!

With money being tight still, I couldn't get my mum a gift, but I made her this:

She really liked it!

I love to make my own cards (as you know), although I don't always have time to do them (or I leave them too late).  Last month was my fiance's birthday.  His birthday is two days after Valentine's day and I decided to make him a card for that too:

sorry, this photo is a bit crappy!

The love heart is worked in blackwork!!!

Today is my nephew's birthday -- he is 7.  I haven't made him anything this year, but my mum has and I'll post that later in the week. As a special treat, he's gone to Euro Disney for a few days!  I hope he's having a really fabby time out there -- wish I was with him :(

Moving onto crochet, over the weekend I made this:

I bought this book called First Crochet before Christmas because it had some really fabby projects in it.  Each project has pictures to accompany the instructions, although they aren't the easiest to follow and it took me a while to figure out how the pattern went.

Once I'd figured that out, stitching it and putting it together was quite easy, and I'm pretty impressed with this (for a first attempt).

With all the crochet I've been doing lately, the stitching has been neglected.  I've not worked any more of my In Stitches guys since my last update, but I did do a bit of Amoongus from the Pokemon Blackwork series yesterday:

I started working on the fills last night but the colour chosen for the hands and body is quite pale and I can barely see it.  It worked okay on Foongus, but I'm wondering whether I should go up a shade on this one.  I'll perhaps try a little experiment later and see whether it looks better!

Finally, the street route for the London 2012 torch relay has been announced today!!!  The torch will be passing through my home town of Congleton on the 31st May 2012!!!!  If you're UK based too and want to know whether the torch is coming to your town, you can view each stage of the relay as a PDF file by going to the BBC's website, HERE.

So that's me done for today -- apologies if I've gone on too long!!!

Till next time ... Keep Kalm and Cross-stitch! xx