What I Do When Not Reading

Alea of Pop Culture Junkie has a meme I love to read that she calls her Weekly Dose of Crafts. Every week or so she shows off the projects she's worked on during the past week.

So I decided to do something a little different and show off my own crafting hobby. With the Holiday Bookmark Swap coming up, I've been busy making bookmarks. And one of my favorite bookmark projects are cross stitch bookmarks. I like doing cross stitch because it gives me a break from work and reading (although I still enjoy reading a lot) and bookmarks are a quick project that I won't get burned out on easily.

My big thing at the moment are name bookmarks. I made one for myself and my brother and one of my best friends for her birthday and they were a big hit. So then I started to get orders for them. So I custom make and sell them now. And it's a lot of fun, because I design them myself.

Here's one I did for a kid who loves Disney. I found a Disney handwriting font and was able to convert it to stitches. I then did it in his favorite colors of navy blue and gray.

After making that one, he liked it so much that he ordered one for his friend, who loves Halo. Hence the Halo font on this one. He also wanted the edges fringed instead of folded over, which was a little bit different effect:
(sorry for the crappy picture. My cell phone camera is all I had when I took this and it sucks)

Here's the first bookmark I did with variegated (color changing) thread. It's a little hard to see because the picture is so bad (see comment about camera phone above), but the thread changes colors as it goes along the letter. It took a little experimenting to figure out the best way to use the thread, but in the end I think it blended really nicely.

This is my latest project, finished last night. Again, I used variegated thread, but only one color this time instead of two. I really like the way it turned out, although I wish I could have gotten the text a little taller. It was a bit hard to work with since the name was so long.
Anyway, that's a little preview of what I've been working on lately. Let me know what you guys think of this post. If this kind of stuff interests you I'll share my projects occasionally. And if not, then I'll just keep my stitching to myself. :) Anyway, I have to go finish another order I have for someone's birthday in December, so I'll wrap this up.