Getting ready for Christmas and some finishes..........

I've been running around non-stop trying to get ready for Christmas. Can't believe we are less than a week away already!  Traveling for work 3 of the last 4 weeks really put a kink in getting any shopping done and decorating the house. Here it is Dec 20th and I have not even got out most of my Christmas cross-stitch pieces.   I did get my Christmas trees up the day after Thanksgiving before I had to head out of town to Minneapolis for a few weeks.    Since I got back I've been trying to do a bit of shopping each night.  I'm almost done now and packages that needed to get mailed are winging their way across the country.

It was tough for this desert-climate girl to get used to below-zero temperatures and snow in Minnesota but I made it through. I don't mind the snow too much but the bitter cold and having to warm up the car, scrape the windshield and all - no, I didn't enjoy that!  I was glad to get home to sunny and warm Arizona.  (It's actually raining today but it's been beautiful all week until today) 

While I was in Minneapolis I did get to see some relatives and I made a quick visit to Stitchville USA before catching my plane home. They moved to a new location since my visit about a year ago - what fun it was to see it all - so overwhelming! I've never seen a shop with such a fantastic linen and fabric selection - I picked up a few colored linens but didn't get too carried away this time. 

I do have a few finishes to share that I've gotten done in the past month or two.   Just didn't have time to post about it. Here is Halloween Rules - I had fun stitching this one, it was my TV project. I plan to send it off to Jill Rensel to have her do her framing magic sometime after the holidays.   I look forward to hanging it up next autumn.

Lizzie-Kate's 'Halloween Rules'

stitched on 32-ct Zweigart 'Stormy Night' linen with recommended overdyed floss

 

 

I also finished up this little holiday project below - couldn't get the color of the linen quite right in the photo of the whole piece but it was fun stitching in just one color for a change.  At first I thought I might make a cube out of it but I think it's too wide (16") for that so I will get it framed instead.

Imaginating Designs -  'Winter Silhouette'

Stitched on 36-ct Lakeside Linen 'Midnight' with DMC white

My favorite part - the little church in the pines (this shows the linen color more accurately)

 

I've been seeing a lot of other finishes of LHN Needleworker out there on blogs in recent months and mine is finally done too.  I just loved stitching this piece even though I made a mistake which I left in. (can you find it??)  It still looks good to me though. 

Little House Needleworks - 'Needleworker'

stitched on 36-ct Lakeside Linens 'Vintage Basketweave' with recommended flosses

 

Here's a photo of our mantel...I made these stars that spell out "JOY" back in November when I went to a quilting retreat.  The pattern for them made each of the pillows about 11" wide but I reduced the size and made them smaller.  They are done with wool applique blanket-stitched onto the fabric starts.  I added twisted cording to give it a little more personality.

 



Finally, here's some finishing work I did about 6 weeks ago for a stitching friend....a pincushion, a Christmas ornament and the lovely "Beggar's Night" from Threadwork Primitives. I love them all and was happy to work on them!



Hope all of you enjoy your holiday time with family and friends! 

 



Technology rant.....

I'm sorry but I just have to vent tonite......I'm ready to throw my laptop, iPad and smart phone out the frigid window!!  I don't know what my problem is but lately nothing seems to be working right for me and I'm very frustrated.  I've been spending at least 10 hrs a day working which is frustrating in itself as we are installing a large new business computer system at work and there are so many problems we are overwhelmed.  So my patience is already stretched thin.  I know lots of bloggers use Blogpress and I downloaded it some time ago to my iPad and iPhone.    I spent time putting a post together a day or two ago in my hotel room (I'm on business travel for 2 weeks).  Took some photos and got everything posted and when my post was published the photos weren't clickable.  The photos had been loaded to Picasa which is where Blogger stores our blog photos, but when you clicked on the pictures all you got were errors.  I ended up deleting my post.   Grrrrrrrr

Tonite I wanted to catch up on reading some of your blog posts as I'm very behind.  I notice that the checkmark to mark things as read in Feedly is gone darn it.  It could be because my husband updated my iPad recently but I'm not happy as I see nowhere to mark posts as read.   So I pulled up my blog on my work laptop figuring I'll just read some posts from the sidebar links I have on my blog.  We'll the version of my blog that I'm seeing on my laptop has a different order of blog feeds than what I see on my phone and iPad.  ???  What the heck is going on here....I have refreshed to make sure I'm pulling the latest versions and not pulling from the cached memory but it's still screwy.  Maybe I'm just getting too old and cranky to keep up with technology....I'm feeling like "Maxine" you see on Hallmark cards....in fact I'd post an image of her if I thought it would work!

Sorry for being such a sourpuss, guess I'll go watch some boring TV instead while I'm here freezing in cold & snowy Minnesota........it's currently about 3 degrees!   Someone please tell me I'm not the only one who has these sorts of issues.......