I’ve been stitching up a storm I have. Sheesh I don’t think I’ve stitched this much in years. For your viewing pleasure today I present Dragon Rampant, a free cross stitch design by Teresa Wentzler. This stitched up very fast but then ground to a halt once I started stitching those columns. Argh! An excercise in frustration and alas, boredom. Thankfully I ploughed through it, and voila. I’ve still got my Teresa Wentzler bug though and next up is Peacock Majesty. This design is going to be a bit of a challenge for me. It’s bigger and has a lot more confetti stitching going...

Title says it all I suppose! I’ve been on a Teresa Wentzler kick lately, and this is the first of several of her work that I plan to stitch. I’m sticking with the smaller designs though. As much as I love her work, some of them can be very big and scary! So I’m stitching my favourite freebies and magazine designs… then slowly building up to the larger ones. I finished Floral Bouquet last weekend, but I wanted to wait for a sun lit day before taking the photo. Alas, it being winter here in New Zealand, sunlight is a rarity right now! So forgive the somewhat meh colours. This...

I’ve been stitching on and off for the last few months, but not sharing what I’ve done. Naughty me So here is one of the completed pieces. This is Peacock Tapestry, a cross stitch design by Just Nan. It was a quick and fun stitching, and the only bits that thoroughly annoyed me was the dark green border. I mis-counted by quite a bit and spent an evening un-picking. Ah well I love love love that gold peacock bead! I think I’ll be finishing this up as a needle case.

I recently had the pleasure of discovering crafting groups on Facebook. A little late, I know; but hey I’ve not been using Facebook much over the last few years for personal reasons. Anyhoos, I was invited to join a New Zealand based cross stitch group, and it got me thinking about a conversation I once had with my good friend Jennie. How cool would it be to get together with other cross stitchers in Auckland? Have stitching meet ups on a regular basis and just geek out with like minded people? So I posted a question on that group, asking if anyone was based in Auckland, and would be interested...

Crafting and making things yourself is big right now. A combination of the Global Financial Crisis and all the austerity measures that seem to be sweeping across the world, more and more people are picking up the hand crafts. It’s become so huge, it’s considered “trendy” if you’re a knitter or crocheter. I’ve always been into cross stitching and have been teaching myself how to sew, knit and crochet recently. Not because it’s trendy, but because these are skills I’ve always wanted to learn, and only now are there lots of resources available for me to...

A few weeks ago Michelle aka Arthemise put up a Halloween Giveaway. I love her stitching and have long admired her gallery, so I wasn’t going to pass up the chance to enter and (perhaps) win her work. Lucky me, I won! The parcel arrived a day ago, and I have been very restrained. I wanted to dig into those Skittles asap, but I had to wait for good lighting to take these photos first. Let’s get straight into them… All the items displayed. They all came packaged inside that too cute felt pumpkin bag. To say that I’m in love with all of it, is an understatement. The bag, the...

Holidaying in Mangawhai is an interesting experience. If you go there, don’t hold any expectations like I did. For an area with beautiful coastlines, it doesn’t really take advantage of it. Hard pressed to find any seafood to eat; at the local fish and chip shop I discovered (to my horror) that all the seafood was exported in. Huh!? Mangawhai lacks identity. It doesn’t know if it wants to be known for it’s famous chocolatier Bennett’s, a golf resort or just as a small coastal holiday destination. The local gallery had hardly any work for sale from people within Mangawhai...

I hate blog posts like this, so I’m going to keep this bit brief. I suck at updating. Why? Cause I have too much to write about, so I just don’t write. It’s overwhelming, I’m lazy, yada yada. So what makes things different now? Well I’ve decided to focus just on one set of interests, i.e. crafting. Everything else is an aside that I may or may not post about depending on how I feel. This includes anime/manga related stuff. You’ll notice all the menus have been updated with lots of links removed. While the content is still available on this site, it’s not the...

For the last six months I’ve been working on an intranet re-design project. I don’t like calling it that, because it’s so much more… but to explain the ‘more’ would take me a day (and I don’t want to let on to our competitors what we’re upto!) Let’s just say, that next year, we’re going to own the Nielsen Norman Group Intranet Design Annual: Year’s Ten Best Intranets and the Intranet Innovation Awards. That’s how passionate I am about the work we’re doing. The bonus is that it’s challenging me. Taking me places...

So maybe I should have already posted about my latest joy. My new Kindle 3. Love love love. I’ll post about it in the future, just felt that I had to say this now. Whitcoulls & Borders in New Zealand are very likely going to be closing down. Why? Various reasons. The question I have is how much of that has to do with the competition they face from eBooks? Kindles, Nooks, Sony Readers… so many variations, all do the same thing. Allow you to buy and download digital books to read on a device. Pros? Cheaper – don’t need to pay for all those pesky things like transport, paper,...