A Little Help Now and Then....

I have no problem admitting I love our critters...yes, even the chickens each have their own special personalities.  I also love my crafting and creating.  Over the years I have taken on sewing, quilting, knitting, crocheting, cross stitching, spinning and more recently wood carving.  Are you getting an idea of what my living room looks like?? 

I card some fleece and then pick up my spindle to spin for just a bit....and before I know it an afternoon is just about gone and I have a gorgeous full spindle to show for it.  I lay my knives out on the table, grab a chunk of basswood....and .....WOW where did the evening go??  And there on my table is a cute wooden Santa and...oops a big pile of wood shavings all over the kitchen floor.  Crap now who's going to clean that up???

I'm sure all of my creative pals out there would agree....what would we do without our creating?  How would we lose ourselves and relieve the stress of a bad day?  What would happen if, for whatever reason, we could no longer create?  This brings me to an awesome little cross stitch discovery I recently made...

EASY-COUNT GUIDELINE

What is it you ask?  Well, now that my eyes have, shall we say, aged a whole lot faster than the rest of me...I admit I have been frustrated with having to strain my eyes trying to count out stitches on dark coloured aida cloth.  This frustration actually was winning the battle and my cross stitch projects were sitting untouched in the basket of goodies at the end of my couch.  That is until the day I was flipping through a current cross stitch magazine and, once I had finished checking out the projects it had to offer, put it down on the table...and there on the back cover was an advertisement for a product that would solve my problem!

R & S Designs Inc. has this wonderful red thread (Easy-count Guideline) that you thread through your aida cloth BEFORE you start your cross stitch project.  It marks out the 10 x 10 stitch guidelines that are printed on your counted cross stitch pattern.  I will admit, this step takes some time, but once you've got it all done you will have no problem at all keeping track of your stitches while completing your project...no matter how dark the cloth or how detailed the project.  It even allows you to stitch colour by colour throughout your entire project!!

Simply go to http://www.rseasycount.com/ and order yourself a spool.  It is very reasonably priced and I am amazed just how much easier and quicker my cross stitching is going.  It would, of course, go even quicker if I would actually decrease the number of projects I have in progress at any one time...

We all can use a little help now and then...