Erica's Stitches

One of the best Christmas smells is gingerbread cookies baking. I used to make a full batch every year.  Then a half batch.  Now I make them every few years. Definitely worth the wait!

It's time for Christmas crafts.  This year I've been painting watercolor candy canes as card inserts. I've also been stamping snowflakes on envelopes and cardstock. 

Here's my latest design. It seems like I've been working on this all year long.  I've been planning having it done every weekend since Thanksgiving but things kept getting in the way. The main design is four squares.  Each one has a slightly different border and a slightly different center. I decided I needed an outer border around the squares.  Typically, I'll figure out how long the border needs to be and break it up into sections.  For example, a border of 70 stitches will have 10 repeats of a 7 stitch design or 7 repeats of a 10 stitch design. In this case, I wasn't in a math mood.  So, I played around with a design on graph paper until I had a repeat that I liked.  I centered it over the design and repeated it past the edges on two sides.  Where the designs met I simply erased stitches and added others until I came up with something I liked.  This time, the plan worked out well.  I like how the chain turns the corner. This is...

I love pretty papers and have a hard time throwing them away. My favorite papers include calendars and Christmas cards. Instead of saving whole Christmas cards I've taken to cutting out interesting circles and saving them instead. I've turned a whole box of them into garlands and gift labels. There are so many styles that I can always find one to suit the recipient. A new batch of cards has started arriving in the mail!  More pretty papers for my collection!  I wonder what I'll turn them into next year. 

Here are this years Christmas Cards. They are similar in technique to the cards I made last year but I was a little more random this year. I used mostly a watercolor scribble drawing cut up into pieces.  There are also bits of other colored papers. This year they are all different.  Some are trees and others are random patterns.  They all have random scribbling.

Time to finish off the ornaments I've been working on.  I was in a rick rack mood so I dug out my collection.  Most of it came from grab bags from Goodwill.  I love some of the older packaging.  It is so much classier than what you find today.  Isn't the Silhouette lady grand? Unfortunately I don't have any red or green rick rack and had to use more boring colors. For the reindeer I sewed the rick rack between the front and back to leave a scalloped edge. Some mini brown rick rack, lace and seed beads finished off a silky Santa. I think I've finished my quota of ornaments for this year ... maybe.

This is a halloween ornament from September/October 2010 Just Cross Stitch.  The ornament in the magazine is done in black and orange and consists of four squares in different  color configurations.  I changed the colors to red and green and turned it into a Christmas ornament.  I only stitched one of the four squares for my ornament.  After the first one I simplified it further by leaving off the border. I'm continually tring different finishing techniques.  For this ornament I sewed the ornament onto felt.  The backing is simply fabric fused to heavyweight interfacing.  I whipstitched the two layers together.  By using a coordinating floss, I didn't have to worry about making the stitches perfect. To stitch the ornament, I used DMC Variagated Floss.  The color changes slower than it does in Sampler Threads.  So, after the first ornament I used only the light parts for one ornament and the dark parts for another....