New Start & Christmas Presents

Despite my determination to get the Snowbound top finished before the end of the year, I caved and started Postcard Cuties for Winter, also by Anne Sutton of Bunny Hill Designs:




The blocks are quite small and such fun to work on. This is block 1. It still needs a star button attaching to the top of the tree. I ordered the embellishment kit which hasn't arrived yet.
I'm so glad I ordered the fabric kit, which contains the original ones which Anne chose when she designed this pattern.

o-o-o

Here are some of my Christmas presents:

From my parents a Christmast isssue of an Australian qulting magazine, a pattern by Lynette Anderson, a very cute cat statue. The cat paw wasn't included in my presents ;o)

My nephew bought us this cute birdie.

And my niece bought these toy rats for our four furry friends.

She also bought me two books by Barbara Erskine and a CD of the musical Mary Poppins. Considering that she is in college and earns her pocket money during weekends and holidays, it is so generous of her to buy us presents!

Two

Today is Kruimel's second birthday. Time really has flown!


This is what our furry boy looked like when he was about 10 days old. The picture was taken by a professional photographer.

Christmas Presents & Other Things

First I would like to show you two presents which I made.

The first one is for my sister, another version of the Christmas Kisses heart pillow. Very different from the one I made for Michele. My sister loves blue colours.


And this is Deck the Halls by The Birdhouse. I stitched this for my parents and made it into a little wall hanging:

Here are a few detail pictures:

Their favourite creatures are reindeer, sheep and penguins, so this was perfect for them.

Mother Nature did her best decorating the outside of our house for Christmas. These icicles were so beautiful!

Do you think the boys are trying to tell me something? Now there are TWO of them at it ;o)

This is the space where I always sit when I do my translation work and this is also my favourite place to do my stitching. But the boys appear to have other ideas ;o)

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas to you and your loved ones.

Here's hoping you'll have a lovely time with plenty of goodies and stitchy presents.

Two Posts in One Day? Yes!

And for a very good reason too: Postie brought my package from Michele!

Open it up, Mummy, is there anything for me, do you think?

And look what it contained. The green 'wrapping paper' is in fact gorgeous fabric, of which I'm showing a picture below.

Thank you so much, Michele, for all the gorgeous presents!!

Here is the Ort Master, posing with all of them.

I just had to try the scissor chain with tiny thimble with my favourite scissors (which incidently were a gift from Michele too). Too cute!

Opening presents is so exhausting... You write the 'thank you' email to Michele, Mummy, whilst I have a little snooze!

Nearly Christmas

Gosh, it has been a while since my last post! So sorry for 'ignoring' you.

So? What's happening on the decorations front? Well, we braved the snow on Saturday and bought a few Kruimel-proof decorations at a garden centre.

This garland came more or less decorated, but I removed the bits I didn't like and added 50 fairy lights. We're hoping there is enough empty space between the television and the garland to deter Kruimel from trying to wreck it.

He has been doing a lot of 'planning', but so far the garland is still safely up on the wall.




At the garden centre I found a lovely fir wreath and also this beautiful heart, which looks like it was stitched.

No Christmas would be complete without the quilt my Mum made us a few years back:

It is a pattern from a book by Art to Heart (Nancy Halverson).

Now that Michele has received the Christmas presents I sent her, I can show you the heart I stitched for her. I used the robin fabric as a backing. The pattern came from an Australian magazine.

I've since stitched another heart in different colours for a special person in my life. Once she has opened her present on Boxing Day, I will show you what it looks like.

This is what our front garden looked like when I woke up on Friday morning:

It is very unusual to have so much snow falling in Holland, and in such a short space of time too.

Yesterday afternoon I found our two British Shorthair sweeties sharing a cat bed. A tight fit, but because Luna is so tiny, it just about works!

The days up to Christmas are always very busy and because I felt rather under the weather yesterday, there is still a lot to do today and tomorrow.

Kruimel doesn't have all these worries and he just likes to relax 'sunbathing' under my daylight lamp.

Not sure where I'm supposed to be doing my stitching....

And last but not least, Margit - my stitching friend from Germany - signed me up for Chatelaine's Mini Mystery 01, which will be starting on the 1st of January. Thank you, Margit!The project is the perfect size to get me cross stitching again! Obviously I cannot show you what it looks like, as it is a mystery, but there are sneak previews to be had on the Chatelaine Yuku board if you are interested.

Thank you for your kind comments on my previous post.

Trying So Hard To Be Good

Our furry boy is trying so hard to be good and not touch the pompom on this snowman's hat.

I'm trying to get Snowbound assembled before Christmas (yeah, well I can only try...) and Kruimel loves it!

Can you see the cheeky look on his face? If you notice a nasty scratch on his nose when you click on this picture, it wasn't a stitching accident, honestly! He was somewhat in the wars with his 'friend' Elvis, who doesn't appreciate his cuddly nature. Elvis was dumped and found in the street when he was only a tiny kitten and he never really got to grips with normal social cat behaviour. Kruimel having been born in the safe and good care of his breeders and his mum, is a very social cat who is very affectionate towards Elvis and Luna.

Not much else I can show you, because the other project I'm working on is a Christmas present for my Mum and the project I worked on last week was a present for my friend. It is now winging its way over the big pond. I promise I will show them all once the recipients have seen them. I did take pictures!

In the mean time we're racking our brains to come up with the perfect solution for some Christmas decorations that Kruimel cannot break or eat. Last year when we put our Christmas tree up, he straight away started to chew the lights and there were tiny pieces of glass everywhere (probably also in his gut) so we took the Christmas tree down asap.

You can imagine that I just had to smile when I read that his little niece Poeka (Kruimel's sister Kira's daughter) proceeded to do the exact same thing when her new mum and dad tried to get the Christmas tree up. Needless to say, they have had to take it down again. Honestly, that picture could have been our furry boy exactly one year ago. Here is his picture:

We never got past this stage of the tree (no baubles or other decorations and certainly no garlands!)

He just seemed to have claimed the tree as his property, becoming the Tree Master for several days. The lovely tree skirt was made by my Mum, by the way.

And our little girl was our biggest present of the year 2009, and here she is posing with last year's presents.

My Garden 5

A few days back I finished block 5 of My Garden (by Lynette Anderson):

This pretty block is called Butterfly Garden.

In the mean time I'm working on my Snowbound top and also on a Christmas present, which of course is top secret :o)

Thanks for all your lovely comments on my Snow Angel.

Snow Angel

Now that Anne Sutton of Bunny Hill Designs has published part 12 of Snowbound, I can finally show you my Snow Angel, which I finished on 8th November:

This is the final block in the series and I'm in the process of trying to assemble all the blocks. I will not be using the layout which came with this design, but I'm doing something similar to A Tisket A Tasket, a previous free design by Anne Sutton.

My Garden

Postie finally brought a little package from Australia containing block 6 of My Garden by Lynette Anderson.

This reminded me that I had almost completed block 4, The Birdbath. It only needed the bird's wing attaching and also the wooden birdie.

Block 6 is very cute with a very pretty ladybird. But block 5 still needs doing, so I guess I just have to ignore this little ladybird for now.

Three little newborn baby hats are now waiting to be assembled. On Saturday I received some really pretty and colourful wool in the post, three different colours from the "Baby Wool Color" range from Schachenmayr/Nomotta. The 25 gram balls that this wool comes in are ample to knit the baby hats that Save the Children asks for. Very cute!

Scandinavian Christmas Progress

My Scandinavian Christmas project is coming along nicely. Here is part 1, more or less completed:


The perfectionist in me couldn't live with the 'untidy' cross stitches I ended up with in the stitched border, so I went with this trim instead. Some work needs doing to tidy the trim up a bit, but I do like the overall look of this block. I couldn't iron it, because the blue tracing lines haven't entirely faded.

Block 2 is coming along nicely too. It has four churn dash blocks, of which I have one completed and two cut and prepared, but not yet pieced. It also has one stitched snow flake block similar to the two in block 1.

The fabric looks grey in these photos, but it is a taupe-coloured linen-look fabric.

Of course the Ort Master helped me.....

...but not for very long this time. He got utterly bored with all those pieces of fabric which I was cutting, only to put them back together again.

Two Charities

Isn't it lovely when charities and stitching/knitting are somehow related?!

The first charity I would like to draw your attention to is a Dutch one: Save the Children is asking knitters to knit hats for newborn babies in India.




The second one is Quilt Aid 2010:
The chosen charity of Quilt Aid USA this year is very close to my heart. They are supporting a hospital in Ethiopia, a country where I lived as a child.

There are many quilting and stitchery blocks to choose from.
The theme is Heart & Home.

My choice was this block designed by Anne Sutton of Bunny Hill Designs.



I'm still eyeing the other gorgeous blocks ;o)

o-o-o-o

Please, if you are a knitter and have some spare wool (it needs to be pure wool, for safety reasons) and a bit of time on your hands: a little hat only takes a few hours to knit. You can download the pattern from the special website. The project runs till end of February 2011.

Thank you.

Quiet? This is the reason why!

You don't really think I can do anything at all when the Ort Master is in charge?

Lots of News

It has been a while since I updated my blog.

This afternoon I paid a visit to my favourite LNS and bought the materials for Scandinavian Christmas by Lynette Anderson.


The pattern has been screaming at me ever since it arrived before our holidays and now I just had to go out and buy the essentials :o)

This is what the quilt will approximately look like when it is done.

Image copyright Lynette Anderson.

Today I completed block 11 of Snowbound by Bunny Hill Designs. Anne Sutton designed another very cute block for this month. Only one more to go and then all the piecing and finishing still needs to be done. But at least I'm caught up with all the blocks.

And Kruimel aka the Ort Master is convinced he still fits in the basket of the climbing pole. It is a very tight squeeze, as you can see!

We are in the process of constructing a big cat enclosure in our garden, so they can go out for some fresh air and a bit of scratching and climbing, and still be safe. Once there is more to see and the garden is not such a huge mess anymore, I will share pictures.

Apart from Snowbound, I worked on My Garden BOM block 4 (also by Lynette Anderson) which is very nearly done (I will share a picture soon) and also lots of work was done on Le Jardin by Bunny Hill Designs. I need to find a way of displaying what I have completed so far, to see what progress I have made to date. That quilt is huge! More about that soon.