Willow Pattern card

On one of the stitching forums I frequent, someone invented a new word which was so graphic that we all adopted it. Many of us stitch ornaments for the Christmas tree, but once stitched they are still just bits of fabric until they are mounted over card, or backed and stuffed like little pillows, with cording round the edge and a means of hanging them. We needed to differentiate between 'I have finished this ornament' meaning, 'I have finished the decorative stitching on the fabric', and 'I have finished this ornament and it's ready for the tree'. Someone identified the final finishing off process as ornamentifying and it is such a useful word! I am now proposing a derivative for the cardmakers' vocabulary: cardifying. It would be used after you have gathered together disparate embellishments, images, background papers and cardstock for a card and later finally assemble them as a complete, ready-to-send item. I realise it doesn't have quite the same impact as ornamentifying because there's usually a much shorter time scale involved (I've known ornaments be ornamentified years after they were stitched) but to prove my point, here is an example of a card which was stitched last week and cardified this morning!


This is the front, covered in paper from a book of oriental designs published by Search Press. The tie is soft round cord from my stash, looped round and fastened with a lark's head and then knotted, with two brass charms added to the tails. It slips off the card to reveal...

...the inside with a stitched panel and the greeting by Funstamps using Versafine ink in Majestic blue . The righthand panel then opens to reveal.....

...the second and third panels of the Willow Pattern Story. These were so much fun to stitch, using DMC embroidery thread in shade 798. The card is for a friend celebrating a Very Special Birthday soon (but I can't say any more) and I think I'll be doing more like it just for the fun! All patterns from Form-A-Lines, which is the third site in a trio with Pinbroidery and Stitching Cards (yes, there is a reason for the separate sites but it's a long story).