Ornaments

Its reveal day for the Stitch and Stash Ornament Exchange. Here is the gorgeous ornament I got from Julie. Its a Cherished Stitches design and I love it. Julie says her husband wanted to keep it, I'm so glad she talked him out of it! It is three sided, Julie has pictures of the other sides on her blog and they are all equally stunning.

I also recieved this beauty from Valerie in the TGOSM exchange. Aren't those little squirrels just the most adorable little things.

These are the two ornaments I sent out. As you can see they are both the same design, but done in slightly different colours on different count fabrics. They are both backed with the rather fabulous fabric they're photographed on.

As it happens one went to Julie (I'm not sure if the exchange was designed that way or if it was a coincidence). I haven't heard that the other hasreached its destination yet (it had a bit further to travel), so I'm not saying who it was for.

Flowers

Regular readers will know that our local florist holds a Christmas flower arranging evening each year which I like to go to, and this year was no exception. These are the pretties we made this year:-
a star shaped arrangement and a pair of "bridged" arrangements.
I've got pictures of two beautiful exchange ornaments I've recieved to show, but it isn't reveal day till next week for one of the exchanges, so I'll save those till I can post them all.

DIY Door Wreath

I got the idea for this from a post a few months back on Heidi's blog, where she had made a lovely fabric wreath.

There are two parts to making this:

1) the indoor part

Get a pile of 5" squares of Christmas fabric, fold in half wrong sides together, sew along the long edge and one short edge, & turn right sides out.

Stuff them with polyester fibrefill, turn in the open edge and stitch closed to make little pillows. I made about 16 because that was when I ran out of fibrefill.

2) the outdoor part (because its messy)

Take a bag of straw , a wire wreath ring and a bundle of raffia.

Take handfuls of the straw, and working round the wreath base bind them in place with the raffia.

Make a loop of raffia at the top for hanging.

Don't worry about any long endy bits. Rustic is good.

Now take your little pillows and tie them tightly to the wreath using short lengths of raffia and tying little bows.

Finally add some little wired baubles to finish off and hang on your front door.

Ta da!

(Note to self: Front Door needs painting)

This and that

Its reveal day for The Monthly Challenge at the Stitch and Stash forum. This month we all stitched "Peace" by Elizabeth's Designs. Here is mine. I Christmassed the colours up a bit from the original and changed the flowers to snowflakes. The other finishes are in the album here.

Other than that I've finished and posted two ornaments for exchanges, that I can't show you yet, and recieved an absolutely exquisite one, that I also can't show you yet though I'm itching to.

What I can show you is this. They held a quiz night last week at the girls' school to raise money for prom (when did Eloise get old enough to be going to prom next year???) and "Team Wilkins" won!

By the way, my living room wall isn't really "inside of a submarine grey" its a nice soft antique sage colour, but it couldn't compete with the blinding glare from the trophy ;D

Is there a teenager in the house?

In point of fact there are now TWO
(be afraid, be very afraid),
because Naomi is 13 today.....
Yes, my baby is all grown up
It only seems yesterday when she looked like this!
A good post day too. I won a door prize from Arachne's Silken Web at the Online Needlwork Show, and it came today. Isn't it lovely? Sadly I fear there is absolutely no chance whatsoever of this one being done by Christmas...

I'm weak!

What can I say? Saw it, wanted it, bought it!
This is J'arrive from Tournicoton (available in the UK from HollieStitch) isn't it just gorgeous?
What do you think my chances are of having it done for Christmas?

Two scary things and a long awaited finish

Looking cute for Halloween is seriously uncool when you are 15 and nearly 13, so here are the two undead creatures that manifested themselves in our house last night.

I'm lucky I survived the night with my brains uneaten!



A couple of weeks ago Heidi posted a picture of a cushion she'd just made from something she'd stitched years before, and suggested we hunt out something similarly old and finish it.

Well I immediately thought of a piece from an old TGOSM that was languishing in the bottom of my stitching basket, and on Friday I dug it out.
At this point you need to take a pause and fully understand the scope of that statement. This was not merely a case of looking underneath a couple of charts, this was a major logistical excercise involving the painstaking movement of multiple teetering piles of magzines, fabrics, wool, patterns and books, the temporary loss of the study carpet, and a lot of very pithy words. Anyway, I got there in the end, and I now have a lovely new knitting bag to show for it.

Insert Happy Dance here ;D

Go on, find something old and finish it, you know you want to....