Mother's Day gift

This pin is themed specifically for my mum! The charms are a Welsh dragon, a Welsh lovespooon, a Green Man, a daisy (my daughter), and Celtic knots. The red stones are garnets as she was born in January, and then I added some glass beads to chunk it out a bit. I did try and fit in a sheep and a Snorkmaiden (for my other daughter, named after the author of the Moomin stories) but that seemed a bit OTT. The ladybird spacers (in between the garnets on the right hand side) mean me....in case she forgets who made it! Next up is one for me, with lots of different ladybirds.

Crafty afternoon!

My lovely other half took Daisy off to his mum's this afternoon and it's amazing how much you can get done without the 'assistance' of a toddler! As well as the ironing I made bara brith - fruit teabread - and microwave fudge, finished the penguin bag and experimented with a kilt pin brooch kit I bought on ebay a couple of months ago. I didn't take a photo of the fudge but here's everything else...

Useful websites

I was having a trawl through cyberspace today in search of design paper and discovered two amazing sites where different grids can be downloaded for free, along with some other useful stitchy tools:

http://stitchpoint.com/eng/tool/grid/_intro_graphpaper.php - under the tools link at the bottom of the page you can also find a fabric calculator and quite the best alphabet generator I've come across.

http://www.cyberstitchers.com/StitchingTools/GridPaper/index.asp?processForm=0 - not only can you download different grids, but you can also upload your own image behind the 'paper' so you can see how it looks. How clever is that???

This week - as well as thinking about sampler design - I'm playing with kilt pins and beads. Will post pic of whatever I come up with. Ribbon scarf is 30cm long so far, and the weather today was positively springlike. Still, winter always comes round again...