A Long-Overdue Christmas Wrap-up

 It's been a tough month.

On the crafting front, I started Sue Spargo's Christmas tree pillow project. I cannot actually afford any of her kits, though, so I worked out of my stash. In the process I changed some motifs and stitches to suit my tastes, such as adding a manger scene because Christmas isn't secular for me, and eliminating most bullion knots because those are the devil's stitch. What I have so far:

I also stitched this freebie from Momentoell. I like the chunky effect she gets by using 6 or even 12 strands of floss. The lovely, soft colors are a nice change of pace, too, from the usual embroidered Christmas tree.

Not much jewelry making happened, but I did remake a bracelet (which apparently I never photographed) with several Christmas-themed charms into a necklace. No point in wearing a bracelet if my wrists are covered up in several layers of long johns and wool sweaters (it's so cold where I work).

 

My middle son gave me a skein of acrylic yarn for Christmas. I love the color, but it is too scratchy to wear so I crocheted a garland. This worked up so fast and fun I made a second with a different yarn.

He also gave me more buttons, so I made a button garland for the tree.

And I finally finished my youngest's quilt: 

On the book front, I read three Christmasy books:

The White Priory Murders by Carter Dickson: An enjoyable locked-room mystery, where, amusingly, Dickson had two characters immediately propose the most obvious explanations to accuse each other. John Dickson Carr was name-checked in the locked-room mystery Wake Up Dead Man, too, which was a fun little easter egg.

Snowed In by Catherine Walsh: a cute holiday-themed contemporary romance, related to her previous novel, Holiday Romance. I enjoyed it, but it lacked an effective structure to hang the story on.

Golden Age Christmas Mysteries ed. by Otto Penzler: some of these would better be classified as spy thrillers or adventures, but all were enjoyable. The collection runs the gamut from light-hearted, comedic stories to darker, melancholic ones, so there's something to suit most tastes.

I think that about wraps it up. Aside from the food, cancelled trip, car troubles, pretty snow fall, improv king cake ...

Christmas Sampler

This sampler was the ninth of my stitch9challenge, and I finished it on the second to last day of the year. It was by far the most fun to stitch:

The Christmas pudding, and Nativity were inspired by other designs, modified by me to fit the 14x14 stitch squares. The Charlie Brown Christmas tree, regular Christmas tree (made from fly stitches), and winterberry bush were my own design. The cross stitched gift was a Stitchy Box design, the one over one cookies were Brooke's Books designs, and and the blackwork was from ... somewhere. The beaded candy cane was a reject from a pair I made for earrings. I made a beaded snowflake, stitched a woven rose, and embroidered an ornament-shaped piece of felt. Lace, charms, buttons, and a tiny crystal cross round out the squares.

I love inchie samplers, and I'm sure I'll be doing more.

The Keeper of Lost Things by Ruth Hogan

Hogan's debut novel was the March selection for the Inspired by Reading book club. It's the story of a man who collected and stored all the lost things he found throughout his life, in an attempt to compensate for the treasured item he himself lost long ago, and his personal assistant who's tasked with figuring out how to return as many items as possible to their original owners. The assistant herself is a bit lost, struggling to restart her life after the end of her disappointing marriage.

I liked the concept of the story quite a bit -- I am a bit of a magpie myself, and the brief stories associated with the items were fascinating. I also greatly appreciated the fact that Sunshine, a young woman with Down Syndrome, was a character with her own role in the story rather than an object lesson in tolerance for the protagonists.  But there was also a fair amount of uncertainty in Hogan's writing, perhaps because it is her first book. She didn't seem to quite know how much of a supernatural element to add to the narrative, and she wavered between showing the two antagonists as cartoonish villains and deeply flawed humans.

On to the jewelry! I was tempted to make a little mixed media work of the different stories in the novel, but I simply didn't have time. The image of the lost blue button stuck in my mind, however (probably because I love buttons), and I soon remembered I had a silver puzzle piece charm in my stash -- a fitting symbol for both the actual puzzle piece in the story and the mystery of the lost things in general. I added a Venetian glass bead reminiscent of the roses that recur throughout the book. I strung the resulting bundle on pink leather cord.

I'm now kind of wishing I had strung a silver bead or two on each side of the charm bundle, but it's too late now! Maybe I'll come up with something else I can attach.

A Novel Use for Thread Ends

And an idea I shamelessly stole from the MOFA's group on facebook:

I had a little tube left over from a Blueberry Cove Beads box, so I stuffed it with purple, fuchsia, and gold thread snippets.

While I was gluing the lid, I decided to knock a super easy project off my to-do list: gluing ear posts to the backs of metal buttons.

Lately I'm loving antique brass findings -- a nice change of pace from silver, and less flashy than gold.

Just in Time

Since we apparently are going straight from summer to winter, I decided I'd better get cracking on a new hat for myself. So while watching/surviving the baseball playoffs I crocheted this:

It's the Chunky Chain hat from Annie's Christmas 2018. It stitched up quite a bit faster, and more easily, than the green hat, although because I have a giant head I did have to remake it a few times before I found the right number of stitches to adjust the size.

And look! The perfect button was in my stash:

The Red Sox are going to the World Series, yay!
via GIPHY

It's a Marshmallow World in the Winter ...

So it turns out, there aren't any Christmas songs with the word "gingerbread" in them. But the "icing" on this gingerbread woman is sweet, if I do say so myself:

This was originally a Victoria Sampler pattern, "Gingerbread Cookies," but if you go to that link you'll see I made a lot of changes -- I got rid of the Santa hat and omitted the buttons and beaded necklace, instead filling in her dress with a blackwork pattern accented with the necklace "pearls." I did use two of the white buttons for eyes, and added a few white seed beads for the mouth. She's backed with a brown batik fabric and lightly stuffed. The picture is not great, but I'm really pleased with it.

Let it Snow, Let it Snow, Let it Snow!

Beadboy1's quilt -- a decades-old commercial quilt of dubious quality -- is literally falling apart. He's getting a new one for Christmas, so I've decided to use the old one as a cutter for different projects (when I can wrestle it away from him to snip pieces). First up was Kathy Kerstetter's Vintage Snowmen Ornaments, from the 2015 issue of Quilting Arts Holiday:

The buttons on the middle pieces are vintage; the beads and buttons on the faces are not. And they are missing their "carrot" noses, which I only noticed after they were all done. Oops.

Beadboy3 was enamored of these snowmen and begged me to make one just for him, so I did out of craft felt:

I remembered the nose this time

He's sleeping with it as I type.

Halloween Sampler

I've finished the sampler I made with Stitchy Box's Halloween Countdown box:

This was a lot of fun! I'm in the process of charting it, although all the specialty stitches may be beyond my software capabilities.

Button Flowers

A few more to add to my bouquet:

My Valentines

Wool Heart Valentine by Robin Kingsley:

I made the first one back in 2005, when it appeared in American Patchwork & Quilts, but my mom forced me to give it to her -- I offered her the pattern so she could make one herself, and then I offered to make a second one for her, but she insisted that she had to have the one I made.  Last month I finally got around to making another one for myself.

Flamingo Toes's Felt and Fabric Heart:

A tiny crocheted heart that's totally as neat and elegant as the original:

A button heart, made from a bag of pink buttons I couldn't resist at the craft store:

Too bad the sun washed out the color in the photo

I was more productive than I thought in the last month!

Button Hoop Sampler

Doe-c-doe has a wonderful floral pattern with lots of circles for displaying buttons, so of course I had to make one for myself -- cream wool on taupe linen:

My first thought was to use a variety of stitches, including buttonhole and the pretty laced backstitch for some of the circles:

But it looked too busy.  I then tried stem stitch for the outer circles (having used split stitch for the inner ones):

But the combination of the twist in the thread and the direction I stitched resulted in a ropey look I didn't like at all.  So I went back to split stitch, and that really was the best look:

The finished hoop is on the wall with some other button projects.  A yo-yo and button nine-patch from a long-forgotten quilting book:

A button wreath from a long-forgotten craft book (my memory is great!):

And a framed display of three vintage mother-of-pearl buttons given to me by a sewing buddy (thanks, Maura!):

Button Garland

Inspired by something I saw on pinterest.  I strung them onto perle cotton and tied a half-knot to keep them from sliding around.

Button Cuff

The idea came from Craftstylish's Woven Button Coaster project.  I don't have much use for coasters, but I saw that the pattern could be adapted easily to make an awesome bracelet, using shirt buttons from Mr. Beadgirl's worn-out dress shirts.

The first step was to weave together a row of buttons long enough to go around my wrist:

I made two more (odd is better than even) and wove them together:

Done!

But the result was plainer than I expected, and the bracelet cried for some embellishment:

Sewing on the extra buttons had the added value of stabilizing the bracelet, because the buttons tended to shift three-dimensionally (by which I mean they tended to overlap each other rather than staying on the same plane).

For the clasp I sewed a shank button on one end, and made a seed-bead loop on the other:

I love it.  It's super comfortable to wear, too: