and the winners are....

KAY and SHARON W!!!

Congrats ladies! Contact me with your email address at ...........It takes at least a day for 123stitch to send you a gift card notification. By Thursday this week, you should see something! Thanks for playing everyone! Wish I had gift cards for everyone!

So how are you all? Keeping warm? Two weeks ago, our summer turned to winter in one day. I'm not sure we had an Autumn! I broke down and turned on the house heating and it's been on ever since! The older I get the colder I get. People are saying that for here, it's going to be a dry winter. So no white Christmas this year I guess:(

The stitching continues, however!

On December 1st, I picked up Christmas Garden by BBD....here is what I've stitched so far..

The lighting is not so good...below is the before picture...

I have already made a small counting error on this! At least I'm consistent! See the beginnings of the large flower at the right with two buds and the vertical stitches that look like a sideways J? They're 1 stitch too many. I'm not going to remove it because it won't throw anything off. I believe the light gold partial border below everything on the newer picture is the halfway point and I've almost stitched a quarter of the entire design. That huge flower is the center of the top portion. I'm enjoying this. A threat to Garden is a SAL that I joined. It's called Harry Potter-The Class Schedule SAL. Right now most people are stitching in the words Class Schedule and a bunch of boxes below it. I have the perfect fabric for it. I'm just clamping on the bit about starting this now but I really need to stitch on Garden more. The moral of this story is: never get on the internet first thing after waking up! I woke up, got on FB and someone was asking about this SAL. They had me at Harry Potter! I don't have a link for the SAL but if you search Armada Designs, you'll see it.

Before all that above, I had more done on the Christmas Carol Sampler. Here is what it looked like my last post..

and how it looks now...

I have turned the corner at the bottom. As you can see, I have the background houses in, the rest of the left-side border, and the top of the black carriage. I'm sure there are more snowflakes to stitch here and there. I'm more than halfway done. I'll be working on this more in January. Unfortunately, I ran out of the GAST Moonlit Path, the blue/gray of the big house. So I'm worried what a new skein will look like and hope the dye lot matches that one^.

I also FFO'd a little Christmas design and made it into a flange pillow via Vonna the Twisted Stitcher and her tutorial...

I don't know the name of it but words on my copy are Jura point de croix. Anyway, I love it! I made a mistake while cutting but it's not noticeable in the picture. First time making a flange pillow so this is my practice pillow. I love that kitty peeking behind the snowman. On the chart he has red eyes and red whiskers. Well, that won't do! So he has white eyes and whiskers now. I coffee dyed the ribbon at the top left. I have another flange pillow candidate so be watching for that. This was so easy and Vonna explains it very well. Thanks Vonna!

So that's is it! I wanted to announce the winners, show my progress and the one FFO. I have a work Christmas party next week so I have to find something to wear. I have Christmas cookies to make for gifts, a few more gifts to buy and wrap. Yesterday, I bought a few things and wrapped them. My daughter is 22 so she likes gift cards along with stocking stuffers. For my brothers who live in Phoenix, I send them gift cards. They say not to buy them anything; well, I'm the big sister and I do anyway!

Stitching-wise-I'll keep stitching on Christmas Garden while fending off Harry Potter and his influence! This 53 year old loves Harry Potter! I may use the last week of December and this year to start the HP SAL. We'll see...

I'll be back the end of December with an update on this past year. I had lots of finishes too. Happy about that. 

So I'll take this time to wish you all a very Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and happy days!!