The Stitch Up

Christmas Day

This Christmas weekend has been a perfect blend of fun and relaxation.  The Hubby and I spent a quiet night out at Russia House Christmas Eve.  

The vodka was smooth and the food was delicious.

It was nice to have someone cook and and wait on us considering the holidays usually involve so much of our own cooking and running around.

Christmas day was also quiet.  We opened gifts and then took our time cooking our Christmas meal.

After a delicious meal we took a walk around the neighborhood to enjoy the Christmas lights.  We did a decent job on lights I think:

I especially like our retro Santa:

But the neighbors were pretty impressive:

I also finished my Christmas coaster project:

These were finished so close to Christmas however, that I'm hoping my recipients appreciate having coasters ready to go for next year - since they didn't have any time to enjoy them this year!

My other project was a little enhancement to some handkerchiefs for the husband:

Very manly, totally non-girly embroidery!

I hope everyone's Christmas was wonderful.  I'm looking forward to lots of projects and trips in the New Year!

 

 

On to Christmas!

I refuse to think about Christmas before I've celebrated Thanksgiving.  Well, technically I guess that's not true.  I try to start some of my Christmas crafts before Thanksgiving.  But, Christmas songs, Christmas decorations, early run-ins with Santa Claus?  I don't want any part ot those things until after I've stuffed myself with turkey and stuffing.

The Christmas crafts I started are going to be hostess gifts.  I decided to make some coasters with cute Christmas fabric on one side and a little embroidery on the other side.  So far, the unfinished process looks like this:

I'm using embroidery patterns from The Floss Box, Martha Stewart, and the book A Rainbow of Stitches. 

I've got a ton of cute Christmas fabric.  Not all of it will be made up for coasters.  To be honest, I'm not sure how I'll use it.  I went a little crazy in the fabric stores but I guarantee I'll figure something out.

I fell in love with this Alexander Henry fabric.  I'm thinking it might look cute as a Christmas apron.

At the very least I could put a frame around this and enjoy it that way!  

Now that I'm ready for Christmas it's full steam ahead.  I hope there will be plenty of time to finish these Christmas crafts and others.  Merry Christmas all!

Christmas Crafts - The wrap up

Yes, it is almost February and I still have some Christmas notes to make.  I am proud to say that we have managed to take down the Christmas tree and lights though, so that's something.  I wanted to post on the hostess gifts I made this year for Christmas.  The idea was that these would be accompanied with a plate of cookies, however I was lucky just to get a couple of these to their intended owner.  The cookies were one step to far.  I have high hopes for next year though!

I made some tea towels with Christmas designs.  They were fairly simple designs which just used an outline stitch and a few french knots here and there.  But they came out pretty and I think you could jazz them up however you wanted with trim or beads or what have you.

The first designs were free patterns from The Floss Box.  This is a great embroidery/craft blog at any time, but she has great design ideas for Christmas.  I put three ornaments on each tea towel and tried to mix up the patterns with each towel:

 

A couple close ups of the ornaments:

 

 

I also did a couple of Christmas trees designs as well.  This is from the always awesome  Badbirds blog.  Again, this blog is great at any time of year for people who love to embroider.  She usually has a free pattern every month and they are fun and quirky and like nothing you'll find on any other site.  The Christmas tree pattern is lovely:

  

So that's the last of my Christmas crafts.  I'm reminded again this year that if I want to get things done in time for Christmas - I need to get started sometime in June!  I've book marked a ton of great patterns and ideas from other bloggers in preparation for some really organized crafting for 2010.  We'll see how it goes!