Christmas In August

As some of you may know, I spent much of the summer laid up with sciatica. The only place this condition was tolerable for me was in the garden where I spent a lot of time in a mainly reclining position alternately blessing my iPod and my ebook reader for providing distraction from boredom and discomfort. After a while though even that wasn´t enough for me so I hobbled back into the house, hunted out my needles, threads and patterns and started cross stitching some Christmas cards. I suppose it seems strange to even think of Christmas in August but even these little motifs take some considerable time to stitch, especially for someone like me who can never stick to the colours specified in the colour key or even to the chart itself.

Take this chart for example. It´s supposed to be an angel but whoever designed it seems to have got a little confused because it´s the only Christmas chart I have in which the angel is carrying a magic wand.

That was easy to alter with a wave of my own magic wand.

I liked the result so much that I ended up making several, though as you can see, I hardly stuck to the colour key at all. These are a few of the finished cards.

 

Another motif I enjoyed stitching was this one.

It offered so much scope for change that I got a bit carried away. First of all I decided to add a glittering star to each tree and also to add sparkly thread to the trees themselves. Unfortunately the effect doesn´t show up on a scanned image so you´ll have to take my word for that. Here´s the first one I made.

I went on to make quite a few after that simply because I enjoyed changing the colours each time. These are just a few of them all framed and ready to go.

 

Of course, stitching them is the fun part. Actually finishing them i.e. washing, pressing, lining, cutting them out and finally creating cards to frame them is something else again so I´ll draw a veil over the hard part!

Creating these little motifs was a sort of therapy for me. It helped me to feel as if I was doing something useful and not just self-indulgently lounging around on the lawn all summer. Which reminds me, even in November the lawn is beckoning me. Well, not so much the lawn itself as Dora who´s waiting there for me to join her in a game of her own invention called something like I-might-let-you-kick-this-football-but-only-if-you-ask-nicely. I always do and she usually does...

Preparing For Christmas

Since I got back from Scotland I´ve hardly had time to draw breath! For a while I got totally bogged down in idiot work like washing, ironing, cleaning, dusting and scrubbing. After that it was setting up and trimming the tree and generally making the house look festive, something which seems to take longer every year though maybe not quite as long as it used to take when Dora was a puppy and insisted on helping me. I can do without that kind of help! I remember once taking her for a walk the following day and suddenly noticing something silvery dangling from her rear end. It turned out to be a mangled string of tinsel. I won´t go into details of how it got there. You can probably work that out for yourselves.

But I digress. One thing I really do enjoy is making Christmas cards, something which Dora has never taken any interest in, thank goodness. In most cases this means a lot of preparation in advance. For example the following cards have to be printed on both sides, the motif on one side and the pattern of pin holes on the other. Then I prick out the pin hole pattern, cut out the motif and paste it onto a plain card along with a Christmas greeting. Here are just a couple I´ve made which aren´t really that difficult as the edges of the motif are straight, unlike some which have a lacy edging.

Then there are the cross stitch cards which I only send to my very best friends because they´re quite complicated to make. I´ve already described that process in an earlier post so I´ll just show a couple of the finished cards.

 

This year I´ve also sent some printed cards. Here´s just one in which I´ve used a few elements from A Christmas Carol, one of my Christmas kits.

Which reminds me, included in the above design is a very tiny version of one of a set of three elements which I´ll soon be offering as a festive freebie. So, if you´re also designing your own cards or would like a sparkly accent for a Christmas layout, watch this space....

Making Christmas Cards

For the past few weeks I´ve been making Christmas cards, something which would normally take only a couple of days, but these are a little more complicated than most because they´re stitched rather than printed. Well, the motif is stitched but the layout is printed. Stitching is the fun part as I can plug myself into my iPod and lean back and relax during the day without that nagging guilty feeling that I´m neglecting other more important tasks. But all good things eventually come to an end and once all the stitching´s done I reluctantly unplug myself from my iPod and get on with the more tedious parts of the project. First the motifs have to be washed and pressed then stiffened by the addition of an ironed on backing. After that comes the part I enjoy least, namely designing the layout which entails some very precise measuring...not my strong point. The following screen shot may give you an idea of what´s involved.

 

As you can see, the layout is in 3 equally sized parts, (designed to fit onto an A4 sheet of card) the back of the card, the aperture and the flap which covers the back of the motif. By the way, the little corners within the frame are my guidelines for cutting out the aperture. For that I use a steel ruler and a sharp knife. The 4 vertical lines are for scoring the card in order to fold the flaps neatly and the large rectangle is the actual size of the card. If I´m feeling lazy I only print the card once and write the greeting by hand after the card is folded, otherwise I have to create a new layout with a printed greeting on the right side which will be on the inside once I´ve turned the card accordingly and printed it. Does this sound complicated? Believe me, it IS! However, it only has to be done once as I can alter the layout and change the aperture and the greeting for any similar cards. After printing I score the folded parts, cut the card down to size using – thank goodness – my trusty paper cutter, then all I have to do is cut out the aperture and stick on the motif using double sided sticky tape. I also use the tape for sticking down the flap to cover the back of the motif. TADA! One card down, a whole pile more to do...No, not really as I only make these cards for a chosen few.

Having said all that, here are some I´ve already finished. 

I enjoyed stitching this Christmas pudding so much I made a batch of them, some on cream linen and some on green. I think I prefer the contrast of the green but I like both variations. It´s just a pity that the glittering thread and the shine on the beads don´t show up on these scanned images.

I forgot to say that although the second pudding is smaller than the first, it´s only because it was stitched on finer material.

This angel is very glittery because I used lots of sparkling threads. Again, the effect is lost when it´s scanned.

 

The following 2 motifs were really intended by the designer of the chart to be stitched using black thread on white linen but I think they look more effective and dramatic the other way round. By the way, I stitched the house motif before I realised that it was too wide to fit into a landscape layout and I had to create a portrait layout especially for it. You can imagine how I enjoyed doing that!

I´m off now to start a new project using this chart.

I stitched this motif many years ago and gave it to a friend. This time I´m going to keep it and frame it and hang it in my living room so if I´m not around for quite some time, you´ll know where to find me. I´ll be sitting comfortably in my workroom plugged into my iPod....with a Do Not Disturb sign on the door.