Box of Shame Finish - Christmas Quacker

Hello all,

Following on from my previous post and your positive comments, I took the plunge and can reveal that I have already finished a finish from my Box of Shame!

I decided to work on Christmas Quacker first, featuring Souffle the Duck from the Popcorn and Friends range. Here's a reminder of how he looked all stitched up:

All I had to do was work out how I was going to "scrap" him.

I started off by choosing the background card. That bit was easy:

Then I went through my boxes of glitter and bling to find some potential matches, includng shimmer dots and sparkle fibres:

Next came the ribbon choices, lots of oranges and yellows:

And finally the lettering and other potential embellishments:

I had a lot of options to work with so it was just a case of whittling everything down as the page progressed. I usually like to keep my pages fairly simple so that the eye is drawn towards the photographs, with the embellishments complimenting rather than overwhelming the page.

Framing Souffle was the easy part:

Then came the tricky bit about what to add or not add. I decided to keep the page really simple, especially by not using the sparkle fibres I had originally intended to sprinkle over the orange card to mimic the glitter in the fabric.

So Souffle's finished page looks like this:

What do you think? Not bad for a couple of hour's work and I'm happy! I don't mind if you say you don't like it and it looks really tacky. I fully appreciate it's not everybody's cup of tea.

For now the page is safely tucked away in my album but I have had yet another idea! I already have a 12"x12" shadow box which hangs on the wall and in which I display and rotate my scrapbook pages. So why not do the same with an 8"x8" shadow box? I can choose which piece I want to display and alter it when I feel like a change. Perfect! I don't know why I didn't think of that before.

Hopefully my next completed page will not be as "simple" as this one. It all depends on what goes with the finished piece.

Oh, and I won't be blogging my picking and choosing process again - I just did it this time to show you the steps I go through.

Until next time then,

Rachel x

Plans For Combining My Two Favourite Hobbies

Good morning all!

Over the last couple of months I have been getting the urge to return to a former hobby of mine - scrapbooking. You see, between 2006-2012, during a long break from cross-stitching, I was an avid scrapbooker. And now I would like to scrapbook again.

The "plan" is to divide my time between the two hobbies as my moods dictate. With the exception of next year's 31-new-starts for Debbie's Ultimate Crazy January Challenge (to which I have already committed) and probably the April A-Z Challenge, there will be no hard-and-fast plans, no rotation, no timetable, just a go-with-the-flow-and-let's-see-what-happens approach. It'll be interesting to see how the two hobbies co-exist.

Obviously working on a second hobby will eat into my cross-stitching time and be reflected in the amount of progress I make on my WIPs. But there is a secondary motive.....

I have had the idea of creating 8"x8" scrapbook layouts from some of my Box of Shame pieces. Realistically, my smaller projects are never going to be framed and hung so by combining scrapbooking with cross-stitching I may actually surprise you (and me) and finish some finishes! I already have a few ideas for layouts and an album to store the completed pages in so now it's just a case of putting the two together.

I will, of course, share my completed scrapbooked cross-stitch pages with you, as this is a cross stitching blog, but my other layouts (mostly themed around my children) will not be uploaded and shared.

Like most of my recent "promises" lately, though, please don't hold your breath waiting for this to happen..... although having said that I'm going to start on my first one today!

See you soon, possibly with a surprise!
Rachel x