This is my boomstick!

This was from a couple of weeks ago now but better late than never, eh? It was our Bruce Campbell lover friend’s birthday so a blood splattered film quote from Evil dead seemed fitting.  It is all cross stitched apart from the back stitch lining and frame and the already embossed white card made the red inking in of ‘blood’ a lot more simple, although very time consuming! Unfortunately, I can’t remember where I found the pattern from as I saw it a loooong time ago and stored it away knowing I would use it for her birthday (as well as just having a sieve memory) 🙂

Lazy daisy

This is my first update for a while and there isn’t that much to show. I’m blaming life, although I just need to pull my finger out and get on with getting re-focused. Better than nothing though (I will reassure myself with that) hehe 🙂

Ghostbuster

I’ve only done this small part of Catherine Parr’s body and her arms instantly reminded me of the marshmallow man from Ghostbuster’s. I’m hoping the further on I get with her torso the less I will stop thinking of the theme tune whilst stitching. It can be off putting 🙂

Above Parr

I  have tried to do some stitching over the past few days so thought I would share an update. This is the last of Henry’s six wives, Katherine Parr, the only one not to be ‘dismissed’ in a less than horrible way. Good for her for managing to outlive him and also be a loving and devoted Stepmother to Henry’s 3 children. Bit of an odd piece of trivia, but in my opinion an interesting one, her mother was a lady in waiting to Catherine of Aragon and so the king’s last wife was actually named after his first! Parr ended up marrying the brother of Jane Seymour (Henry’s third wife who died shortly after Edward VI was born) and he was supposedly another bad penny. Gossip circulated that he was carrying out an illicit affair with the teenage princess and future Queen Elizabeth I, who often stayed with her Stepmum and her hubby. With her being twice widowed before her marriage to the king and then the weddings that followed, she sure could pick them! 🙂

Kissing cousins

After I’ve been a bit awol (I won’t go into the boring details of illness), I have a new Henry update showing his fifth wife, Katherine Howard. She is the wife who ‘innocently’ had numerous affairs and was apparently an all round bit of a flirt, that being eventually blamed on her youth and naivety. 30 years her senior, the increasingly more gluttonous Henry clearly wasn’t quite her cup of tea and her lusty ways led her to the same fate as her cousin, Anne Boleyn. Maybe Henry should have just avoided that family, more for their sake than his 🙂

Dorian Gray

Yay! Back to the characters and no more roses for a while! This was the only queen who was no longer wanted and yet managed to stay in favour with the ever mood-swinging Henry. Anne of Cleves was a bit of an anomaly, her beauty in the flesh did not live up to her portrait’s depiction, so Henry being Henry, after marrying her to uphold the political alliance with her German home country, decided she wasn’t quite as pretty as he would like, even going so far as her being cruelly dubbed as ‘Flander’s mare’. Despite the jibes and the huge embarrassment of being shunned by the increasingly obese and grotesque king, Anne managed to stay in favour enough to still be welcome at court and be known as ‘the king’s sister’. Obviously her main calling card was her lack of opposition to their divorce and the alliance with Germany, but she still remained astute enough to still be invited to Palace parties. She certainly had her head screwed on, literally, which is rare in the presence of Henry! 🙂

I don’t be-leaf it!

This is a couple of days worth of stitching and I am very pleased to say I have finished the majority of the border and the rest I can only really do once some more of the characters are done. So I’m really glad about that so I can get off the more boring repetitive sewing and back to my more favoured figures. Sod’s law will probably say that I will miss doing the roses now I have said that 🙂

Deceptive appearances

With every commenter agreeing with me about needing to restitch the ‘Henry VIII’ banner, I did, despite it still looking unnoticeable. This time, it is just the monitor distance and photography rather than it being too thinly sewn as it was before and in person looks a lot better. I’m not making excuses, pinky promise! 🙂

Under the banner

I haven’t finished the banner yet, but I have already decided that I will be back stitching the written ‘Henry VIII’ again because I can barely see it. If anyone disagrees and thinks it would make the text too prominent then I would appreciate the thoughts. As far as my own mind says, I will be relining it later on, but I may be swayed if opinions vary 🙂

Holding the cards

I was sorting out where to put my OH’s birthday cards and realised that I hadn’t shared the one I made for him. It is probably a welcome change from a Henry update so I thought I would pop it on here today instead. I actually had a lot of problems with this one. None with the stitching, that went along fine and I really enjoy creating that part, even with the metallic thread. When I came to mounting it onto card, I thought I would do something different and tried to cut out a circle using a craft knife to frame the aida. I have never used a craft knife for this purpose before and regretted it as soon as I began. It was awful, I couldn’t get a grip between applying the right amount of pressure to make the cut and keeping it spherical. What I ended up with, after keeping on trying to make a circle and actually just creating a larger and larger hole, was a complete mess. In the end, I had to admit defeat and just attach the aida with a lace frame around it, covering up the inner catastrophe with card inserts of a contrasting colour. You can still see the would be sphere in the corner but my OH just found it funny and appreciated it wasn’t the easiest craft knife to use with my hobbit like little hands. Glad he was so understanding, my eyes were not so kind, so it has now been put in a drawer underneath the rest of his cards 🙂