Fifteen Minutes of Fame!

I have some wonderful news to share with you all.

If you subscribe to The World of Cross Stitching or just pick it up monthly as it hits the shops as I do, you might just have noticed my ugly mug in there.

I wrote to them some time ago to share the saga of the nine quilts and thirteen cushions that myself and some very good friends stitched for the hospice that looked after my dad when he was diagnosed with terminal cancer almost two years ago.

To my surprise, I opened up the magazine this month and they have printed the story together with  some lovely photos of my brothers and I handing the quilts over and also some pictures of the friends who helped me.

If you don’t get the magazine but would still like to know what the project was all about,  just follow  this link  and it will take you to all the posts on my blog that relate to the project. 
Remember to scroll to the very end first by clicking on the “Older Posts” tab at the bottom of the page if you want to read the posts in order as the project progressed.

Thanks for stopping by.

Sue

x

Craft Forum Charity Stitching Project.

The start of 2006 saw me involved in my first Charity stitching project with some friend from the craft Forum “Crafty By Carolyn”.

Although the forum back then was mostly aimed at Card making and Scrapbooking, there were a few of us that stitched too , so when one of the members, Sharon, who’s a very close friend of mine now asked if any of us would like to get involved in a charity project I jumped at the chance.

She had been on line and come across a group. OECS, that’s Operation Elderly Charity Stitchers, a group who stitch lap quilts for the elderly and she thought it would be a great first group project for the forum members.

The idea was that she would get nine people to stitch a square each, eight
flowers and a logo and then another member, Nicki, who’s also a very close friend now would have it all sent to her home in Switzerland where she would do the machine quilting to finish it off,  but in reality we had more than the nine people needed who wanted to stitch so we ended up making two quilts.

For my part, I stitched the two logo for the quilts

and four flowers although only three of them made it onto the quilts. 

I think the other one was made into a cushion but I can’t remember now.

We ended up working to a deadline too because the aim was to have the quilts finished for the forum’s first ever big meet up in Birmingham  on March 20^th .  We thought it would be a nice idea to unveil the quilts there so everyone could see them and the best bit was that Nicki actually brought the quilt s back from Switzerland personally so we all got to meet her.

After the get together I thought the project had been so worthwhile that I decided to write to my old pals at “The World of Cross Stitching” again  to see if they would be interested in hearing about the project, which they were  and they put it in their  October (115) magazine.

We later found out that the two quilts been given to two elderly residents at the Castlebar Nursing Home in Sydenham, London.

Cross Stitch Magazine - World of Cross Stitching

November 2002           

I was so excited back in 1997 when a brand new magazine was launched that was dedicated to cross stitch, the aptly named World of Cross Stitching!

I brought the very first issue and have been buying it ever since because as well as being packed with beautiful projects to stitch as you would expect, it also has a wealth of helpful hits and tips and the most inspiring stories written by readers and designers alike.

Now jump to the start of 2002 when there was an article in the magazine about using computers to scan photographs and make them into cross stitch charts.  This is done all the time now but back then it was something completely new in stitching.

Because it was going to be ‘the next big thing’, another craft magazine was giving away a free CD Rom of Jean Greenoff’s program Cross Stitch Creator  so I decided to give it a go and stitch a picture of my cat Emily that I had a the time.

Emily was the first cat I’d ever had because when I was a child I got a severe allergic reaction if I even walked into a room where a cat had been previously.

Despite  this  I had always loved cats and as soon as I got my own place I decided it was time to see if I could possibly live with a puddy cat of my own.
I went to a nearby rescue centre to see what I could find and came home with Emily, a three year old Tabby who I had for seven very short years before she became ill.

She was cutest and most affectionate cat I had ever known and when I would sit stitching in the evenings she would sit on my lap, not making it easy if I’m honest but I couldn’t throw her off, bless!
Anyway as I said, I decided that she would be my first subject using this new technique  and I got my brother to take a digital photo of her for me because  didn’t have a digital camera at the time.

I scanned the photo and imported it into the Jane Greenoff program and hey presto, I had a fantastic chart with amazing detail and even a shopping list of threads by my chosen maker which translated to 27 shades of Brown’s and Beige’s and more than fifty thousand stitches……..daunting or what?

As always, Emily sat on my lap as I stitched…..it was almost as if she wanted to make sure I was doing her justice, Lol, and by the end of September I was ready to get it framed.

Now up until this point I had never really been one to show of my work and say…hey, look what I’ve made, but I decided that I had a little story of my own to tell and thought I would write to The World of Cross Stitch and share the story of Emily and how she would sit and watch me stitch. 

I'd have been over the moon if they had added the picture to their stitcher's gallery but when I didn’t hear anything for them I gave up hope that that would happen...........then out of the blue, I received a letter from them.

Apparently I had been chosen as their ‘Stitcher of the Month and my story and picture would be in the March 2003 issue of the magazine.

My fifteen minutes of fame!

As ‘Stitcher of the Month’  I won a fab prize too………this beautiful Siberian Tiger kit, which I’m ashamed to say is not even only half done and joins the part finished sampler in my footstall.