Colds, Eye-less Santa, and An Argument with a Sewing Machine

My goodness. I didn’t intend to be away from my blog for so long. Unfortunately, we’ve had a rolling series of colds here for close to a month, and the last two weeks were my turn to be sick (from two different colds!). And, with Christmas being so close, I’ve spent my time split between sitting on the couch pouting because I’m sick and working on Christmas gifts. Thankfully, the are all done but one (and some buttons that need to be sewed on…).

I have also managed to find some time to work on my very last ornament of the month. This time it is from the 2006 Just Cross Stitch ornament issue. It is called, originally enough, 2006 Santa and is by Vermilion Stitchery.

2006 Santa by Vermilion Stitchery (WIP)

He is a little creep-tacular without eyes, but overall he’s still a pretty good looking guy. He’s stitched on 28 count white something-or-other using a ridiculous number of colours of DMC floss. I’ll be switching out the gold Kreinik in the border for PTP.

And, miraculously, I managed to finished a couple of the ornaments I worked on this year into something that I can hang on my tree. (Which, sadly, still isn’t up. I am so behind schedule this year!) Unfortunately, I only finished a few ornaments before I got into an argument with my lovely new sewing machine. I believe it is now more or less fixed (I just need some very fine sand paper to buff out a dent in the needleplate). And if it isn’t, it will only take a $30 part for me to make it right myself. The problem: I was sewing on my serger before I moved to the sewing machine, and you use those two machines a little differently. Oops!

Anyway, three finished ornaments for my tree:

Finished Ornaments (Front)

They are, starting from the top left and going around, Home for Christmas by Julia Lucas Designs, Joyous Noel by Teresa Wentzler, and Christmas Kitty by The Cat’s Whiskers.

Finished Ornaments - Back

And here are their backs! If you’ve got sharp eyes, you may have noticed that that is the wrong side of the material facing out for Joyous Noel. I thought about picking it out to fix it, but the linen I stitched it on is very loose, and I didn’t want to risk ruining it. Really, it doesn’t look so bad in person.

I’ll have a few more ornament finishes to share in a couple of days, once my tree is up. These ones were all done on perforated paper, which means minimal finishing. Yay!

I hope everyone else is got their holiday plans well in hand. Other than the tree not being up, I’m actually doing well. The rest of the decorations are up, only a handful of presents remain to be wrapped, Christmas dinner and breakfast are planned (with the grocery shopping taking place next week), baking is sort of started, and the cards were mailed ages ago. Assuming we can all avoid another round of colds, I think we are all set!