New projects for the Holidays

A couple of weeks back I mentioned getting some crafting-needlework magazines as a reward for surviving yet another conference. They've been an inspiration!

This magazine (cover above) and the article on strip pieced ornaments (below).

I decided to make an angel and went shopping in my stash.  I found enough whites and near whites to make it up.  They left theirs plain but I plan to embellish mine with crazy-quilt style seam treatments. This week I went stash-diving again and found tiny sequins, beads, and threads to begin the embroidery.  I have some sheer gold fabric that I'm thinking about using for the wings and some gold for a halo.

Stitch with the Embroiderer's Guild is one of my regular indulgences. I have a subscription and each issue is chock full of great ideas. Some, like the cutwork lantern on the cover, I may never make but it's really interesting to read how they did it.

In the issue above, I spied the design below.  It called for a DMC fiber I couldn't find, so I substituted Kreinik braid (in a high luster gold). They stitched the dots in perle, I'm using rich red silk. Their linen is a dirty linen and I believe the fiber is a sage metallic. I kind of went a slightly different direction.

Right now, my design is a rather crumpled mess, so please use your imagination here.  I do like working in hand.  (If I'd have been thinking, I would have stitched the satin stitch dots first in a hoop and then stitched the metallic chain stitches. I wasn't. And I don't want to smash the metallic in a hoop, now, so I'm stitching very carefully. I still prefer that to a frame.)

The linen is a piece from the Mary Frances stash...a nice soft green.  I backed it with a sheer batiste in white (hence all the green basting stitches you see).  The sheer doesn't change the hand of the linen but it does provide some extra support for the metallic threads and the surface stitching. 

I've completed all of the gold chain stitch and begun on the padded satin stitch red dots. This has worked up incredibly fast.  A bonus is that when I bought the threads (a couple of weeks ago at The House of Stitches in LaPorte), I found a frame there that will work for this. I expect to have it done and framed very soon.