Happy Christmas!

We had an afternoon of Christmas crafting at home yesterday.  The girls and some of their friends decorated felt reindeer, made wonderful fabric Christmas wreaths, made multicolour paper snowflakes, made snowball roses and finished with mini marshmallow snowmen.

My DDs helped to make and decorate the lovely big snowman cake (yummy pudding for us all!).  A really good job!

This was a mini snowman - marshmallows, large chocolate buttons etc etc.  Mine not as beautiful as the ones in the book, but the girls were all happy with theirs!

This was my trial wreath.  Paper plates with the centres removed, sleeve of fabric over it, small decorations (the girls all made yo-yos, I used these lovely roses made for me by Avril) and 'ta-da' - wonderful wreaths!  I wish that I'd taken some photos of them all!

I hope that your Christmas is merry and bright.  Good wishes to you and all the best for a splendid New Year!

One, Two, Tree!

 The three stages of tree making - or, currently, where DD1 is, where DD2 is, and my finished tree!  This is the follow on project from the Santas - another part of Jodi's (from Ric-Rac) project on FaveCrafts.

I'm not sure that we'll have three trees finished by Christmas Day, but it's nice that the girls wanted to join in with some sewing!

I seem to have spent a reasonable amount of time prepping applique pieces over freezer paper for my Love Entwined.  I am still working on the third vase / corner - but Esther published the fourth vase / corner earlier this week, so I'm not quite 'keeping up'.  Never mind, as I think that I'm going to stop at this point and not carry on to make a massive coverlet I'll have plenty to time to catch up again!

I've also managed a few small samples based on the Staffordshire Hoard. Very glitzy.  Lots of fun.  Not really moving me towards a quilt design for a 'proper' quilt rather than an art quilt / wall quilt. 

 I'm sure that it will all help at some point, and that my subconscious mind is working hard on the different aspects that I'd like to include!

I can always hope, anyway, can't I?

You can see that this one was made with the cut outs from the one above, can't you?  Not the same effect at all, but fun to play!

Of course, I have realised all over again (as if I was in any doubt) that although these are fun I'm not really keen on gold and red.  I rather think that I'll be moving back to silver and purple instead (or plain grey and Batik purple, perhaps?) when I make 'proper' samples for whatever quilt I design.

Runner Long (run along....?)

Hurrah!  I've run the quilting threads all over my runner, and I can now declare it FINISHED!

It did only take a total of 17 hours but as they were so spread out over the weeks it started to feel like it took much longer!

You can see that I did a mixture of 'wired' feathers and 'normal' feathers with a fairly tight stipple behind them so that the motifs stand out.  I think that it works fairly well to reduce the standout grey patches.

I did take Kandy's advice and use the same grey for the binding which has also helped.

Not easy to photograph it as it is, as the title suggests (see, not just put in for the pun!), long.

Here it is in situ.  Although not household which is overly religious, part of our Christmas tradition is having out the Nativity knitted by my late MiL.  Here you can see it in pride of place on my new cupboard runner.

If I remember, I'll take a shot of the knitted carol singers that she made too - one Christmas knitted set for each of my DDs.  They are much loved and cherished by the girls, partly for what they represent - a labour of love with them in mind - and partly because they are just so cute!

Hope that you are enjoying some pre-Christmas crafting time.

Shuffling Santas!

I confess, these aren't all my handiwork and that isn't my hand either!

Last night some of my girl friends came round and we sewed a Santa each from the free pattern given by Jodi of Ric-Rac here on FaveCraftsBlog.  Lots of fun, and a bunch of great little Santas.  Of course, what you can't see is the two people holding up the 'green screen' in order to conceal the bowls of crisps, empty wine glasses, scissors and thread ends..... as I said, lots of fun!

The really good news is that I've finally made progress on my table runner.  Quilted and just waiting for the binding to be hand stitched down.  Then after a label has been added it will be complete.  I need to get my designing head on in order to come up with another quilt design.  Ideas flying around but nothing actually out on paper yet.

I hope that you are finding time for some pre-Christmas crafting too.