Healing Crafts

By the age of ten, I learned the basics of knitting, crocheting and sewing for dolls. The results were far from perfect but the process of making something with my own hands always brought me joy and satisfaction.

One day, while visiting a class mate, I learned that crafting might also have healing effect. I saw a white lacy tablecloth on a dinner table. The crocheted handwork was exquisite. From my crocheting experience I knew that someone spent hundreds of hours making the tablecloth. My friend explained to me that her grandmother fell ill after suffering a misfortune. As part of her recovery, she crocheted daily for eight hours, felt better while crocheting until she fully recovered.

From my own experience, crafting calms me, sooths me, makes me happier. I know the same applies to all. Seeing a beautiful product emerge from my creativity and efforts brings me great joy as well as sharing the finished pieces with family and friends.

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Making Art with Free Online Pattern Maker

Patterns always used in the process of creating large and complicated murals, mosaics, and goblins. A copy of a painting was divided into smaller sections, the outlines of the sections were marked on a working surface, and then colorful material or paint was used to cover the sections with color. It took a talent of an artist to create the initial picture and a skill of a craftsman to complete the masterpiece.

Free Online Pattern Maker was designed to match colors of embroidery threads or rug yarn to a digital image. It allows a stitcher to choose quantity of colors and design size in stitches.
The resulting symbolic pattern outputted into a PDF file which may be saved or printed.

The Online Pattern Maker tool migt be also used for choosing DMC thread colors not only for a cross-stitching project. If you do any kind of surface embroidery with DMC threads you can get a list of thread colors which are needed to complete your project.

There are four simple steps you have to complete to make a pattern:
1. Choose desired maximum number of colors.
2. Choose desired size of your pattern in stitches.
3. Select an image and press "Create pattern as a PDF document" button.
4. When the PDF document opens save or print your pattern.

Click here to start making patterns online.

The Magic of Embroidery

For ages people of Earth work with colored threads to put images and motifs on clothing and household items. The main purpose of the embroidery was not only to make things beautiful but to protect their owners from evil. With needle and thread every embroiderers immortalized their hopes, thoughts, and dreams in pieces of art. This might be a superstition but strangely enough contemporary stitchers noticed that some motifs when embroidered bring certain events into life. For example, the famous design of tree little angels from Dimensions Crafts, called "Almost Perfect" often brings a newborn child into stitcher's family. I hope our positive thoughts while we stitch will always lead to positive changes in our lives.

Choosing the Right Project

Embroidery is a time consuming hobby. Often it takes hundreds of hours to accomplish a project. You want to spend those hours in pleasure that why it is very important to choose the right pattern. If you are a novice don't start with an enormous project because it may disappoint you and you will not finish your piece. You need to know peculiar properties of embroidery designs available on the market. There plenty of kits available and you may find some free cross-stitch and needle point patterns online. For 15 years heavily in this hobby I have tried many products, sometimes of curiosity to try a new designer's work. I like to alternate the types of projects I choose to work on. For your consideration is a review of cross-stitch kits and patterns manufacturers that I tried. I will briefly describe my experience in crewel embroidery. I hope you will find the review helpful if you are a novice embroidery magician and interesting if you are an experienced one. For those who wants to know the expert conclusion right away I will say that In my opinion, Dimensions Crafts produces the most enjoyable cross-stitch kits, Spanish Cuadros magazine and Bulgarian Solaria galley make excellent cross-stitch patterns.

Taking Care of Finished Embroidery and Framing

Some people most of all enjoy the process of stitching: the serene hours when you have time to think about everything you can imagine and take pleasure in seeing painting in threads created by your needle. Framing a piece of finished embroidery is a more hectic process that might be frustrating by times. But seeing your finished work beautifully framed might give you great pleasure as well. Read more...

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