A ship, a genie and a marriage for skeletons!

While shopping in a local store I saw a batch of little mini bottles filled with seed beads and topped with a cork stopper and a thought came to me.  Instead of keeping the seed beads in them, how about putting some cross stitch in there - and so my Ship in a Bottle and Genie in a Bottle mini kits were born!  

It took some experimenting at first to work out the size of aida fabric needed to line the bottle, then working out the design so that it could be seen when looking at either side of the bottle.  The stitching itself didn't take very much time at all and though making up the fabric into a little tube was fiddly, it wasn't difficult to do.

The next issue I had was how to keep the bottle safe in transit when sending the kits to my customers. I took a trip to the DIY store and found my solution - tough plastic plumbing pipe. Back at home, my dad was kind enough to cut the pipe into little sections so that a bottle fits nicely inside each one, wrapped in bubblewrap, with no worries of it being smashed.  And here are the finished products:

Another mini cushion has made its way into my webshop.  I had been watching 'Amazing Wedding Cakes' on the TV the other night and saw one such amazing cake that had 'Day of the Dead' as its theme.  I'd never even heard of this celebration before but once I saw the bright skulls and colourful embroidered patterns that were worked into the cake decorations it gave me the idea of creating something along those lines in cross stitch.  Though not exactly Day of the Dead, I went for a gothic style (which is quite different style to my usual flowery ones!) and thought of designing it with a wedding theme so it would make a lovely stitched gift for a couple marrying in goth style.  I included cobwebs and red hearts through the design and gave the skeleton bride and groom centre stage.  Designing the skeleton hands was the hardest part, getting them to look like bones and hands and that they were holding each other!!  But I'm please with how it worked out.  Thinking about the bride and groom skeletons obviously being dead I came up with the title of Love Never Dies and felt the words would look quite cool stitched on a scroll across the top of the design.  And so here is the finished mini cushion:

My latest project is involving cross stitching mini character busts - more in my next post!

Oh, and I'm looking forward to June's issue of Cross Stitch Collection magazine as there may be a nice little article on my designs.