Hello everyone and happy December to you all! There’s a flurry of stitching in my house these days!

Christmas is coming and my “WIP” list doesn’t seem to reduce much in size, but it gets refreshed quite often – LOL! From my family to yours, I wish you all a very Merry Christmas and all the best in 2022. It has been a wonderfully, stitch filled year and I am looking forward to 2022!

Abandoning a project… Mission accomplished. I have abandoned the embroidery piece that came out of the Creative Design class which I took with Janet Scruggs (an amazing artist) and does it ever feel good! I have learned enough from the course and have removed the piece from my WIP list. This class was from the 2021 EAC Seminar. From picture, to drawing, to embroidery – the process of creating an original embroidery design.

I learned more than I expected to in the class and am happy to call it done. For me it was more on exploration into design as opposed to having an actual finished, stitched design as an end point.

Managing the Christmas Projects – I have a very short list!

Planning and stitching gifts and ornaments is just so much fun! My problem is that, all planning aside, there just isn’t enough time to make everything I want to make for all of my people. Realistically, I should be starting now for next year’s Christmas projects.

Over the years I have learned that small Christmas projects are the best – and NONE of them are cross-stitch – I love cross-stitch ornaments – but they take so much time! I usually make ornaments for my children and their partners and an ornament or two for an exchange and that is about it.

This year I was able to stitch and finish an ornament for myself (one of Freda’s Christmas trees) and it’s hanging on my tree! Ornaments are a great way to try out new stitches and designs – they are just enough of a stitch to figure out if you like a stitch or technique. And, if you don’t like the technique, you haven’t committed too much time to stitching something you don’t enjoy. This is the second time I’ve stitched Freda’s tree design – It’s just so pretty!

The Journal – hmmmmm

One journal or two journals – that is the question! I have been working hard on poems, sayings and quotes and am moving again into planning two different journals. It feels like I have a couple of different themes competing each other and it apparently (or not so apparently) I haven’t quite got all of the stitching “out of my system” as I keep adding more ideas to my project list. So back to two books.

To be honest with you, I am having a dandy time stitching up all of the fan fiction pieces (Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, etc.), that I may continue on that theme for a while and see where it takes me.

A hiatus is planned for the journal till January sometime. Ideas are still percolating but I am not planning any new pages right now. I have 2 or 3 that are in progress so those pages will remain in the rotation and hopefully I can finish them up before the end of the year.

In January the focus will shift to fleshing out layouts and making them permanent. It may be time to start putting some pages together!

Journaling as a matter of course… a portfolio of my work. This thought has been mulling around for a while now. What if…. I continue journaling indefinitely?? Making journal pages has given me more freedom to experiment with different techniques and designs and I can honestly say that I enjoy the process of building layouts. More thoughts on this to come, but the journal is becoming more of a portfolio of my work. I think this is good.

The joy of the stitch. A groundbreaking thought – I just love to stitch! I love to stitch all of the things! and the journals give me freedom to do that because I know that when I am finished a piece, it has a place to go. It has a home. I like that my stitchy dabblings and interesting creations have a place to live.

Down the rabbit hole – more cool stuff to stitch!
More from Mary Corbet – she’s just finished a new Dragonfly tutorial series and it’s wonderful!! And she’s just posted a second dragonfly with new colours and a background. It’s always nice to see variations on the same design.

Introduction

https://www.needlenthread.com/2021/10/embroidering-dragonflies-introduction.html

Part 1: Design, Materials, Set up

https://www.needlenthread.com/2021/10/embroidering-a-dragonfly-pt-1-design-materials-set-up.html

Part 2: Embroidering Wee Bodies

https://www.needlenthread.com/2021/10/embroidering-dragonflies-pt-2-wee-bodies.html

Part 3: Embroidering the Wings

https://www.needlenthread.com/2021/11/embroidering-dragonflies-winging-it.html

Part 4: Embroidering Tail and Eyes

https://www.needlenthread.com/2021/11/embroidering-dragonflies-pt-4-tail-eyes.htm

Dragonfly #2: Design & Materials

https://www.needlenthread.com/2021/11/embroidered-dragonfly-2-design-materials.html

Dragonfly #2: Simple Background and New Colours

https://www.needlenthread.com/2021/11/the-final-dragonfly-simple-background-new-colors.html

Free patterns from EGA – so many cool small projects to stitch. I have a few on my list
https://egausa.org/free-projects/

Modern Crewelwork (other than Crewelwork Company)These sites are worth checking out – modern crewelwork – and yes – they are on my list too (spot the fox!)
https://melburyhill.com/collections/crewel-work-embroidery-kits
https://www.elaraembroidery.com

Happy stitching everyone!