Cross-stitched carry-bag

 

I prepared this blog-post several days ago, but blogger has been down for 24 hours and the draft was lost. This is my reconstruction.

A large (40x50cm) stamped cross-stitch bag caught my eye in the recent Fox Collection catalogue  (www.thefoxcollection.com.au) and I bought one to try. The kit is in the Stitch-Art range by Duftin, a Hungarian wholesale company (www.duftin.hu).

The bag comes ready-made in a cream strong grosgrain cotton with similar burgundy poly-cotton backing and handles. I suspect there is a little polyester in the embroidery side as well. It comes with stranded burgundy thread, cut in lengths of about 60 cm.

This would make a perfect travel project.

It involved the same colour and the same stitch with no counting. The challenge was finding the continuous pathway for my stitches to use up all the thread without cross-overs. It's a bit like following a maze.





I like the flowing design with enough white space to please the eye.

As can be seen on the right, I lost my stitch direction a couple of times, but it was easily corrected by stitching the cross-bar under the existing one .

I found this one so relaxing and was so pleased with the result I identified three similar bags - different designs - in both burgundy and black on the Duftin website and got in touch. Although they are wholesalers, they have a few kits in hand and have agreed to send them to me from Hungary.

Given the stash of projects I have already, this is probably madness, or obsession. At least these will be good projects to take to the nursing home if I don't do them in the immediate future!