Santa Time!

Well, it's that time of year again.... when snowflakes are falling and stitchers are frantically stitching to finish their projects by the holiday deadline.

I've been stitching up a few small Prairie Schooler santas that I'll be giving as gifts (the ones shown at the top).

And then (as time permits) I've been pulling out various Christmas canvases and stitching a bit on each one, to get back into the Christmas Stitching Spirit.

Here's a Santa I'm working just for myself - it's a Pat Thode Santa that I showed you quite a while ago....


It was one of those (many) projects that I stitched just so far then set aside when I got bored with it. I picked it up again last week and decided to push on through to (finally) finish it. In a spurt of energy I added all the finishing touches - the ribbon on the wreath, the pull string and button wheels on the sheep, bells on the boots, etc... and then I decided it needed a different kind of background.

I tried a bit of the vertical lines of snowflakes. Nope, too faint.
I then tried some pale vertical stripes - like wallpaper - but it looked like Santa was in jail. An upscale shabby chic jail, but still, not the look I was going for.

Then, as luck would have it, I was in the midst of printing a batch of my BLACKWORK PATTERNS book and as I was collating the pages, a thought flickered thru my brain - why not try a blackwork pattern for the background? Oooooh, that was intriguing....
so I stopped and picked out a pattern to try on ol' Santa. Here's how it turned out:


I think I like it. It's so different... maybe it's too distracting, but still, I like it. I used one ply of a pale seafoam green DMC floss (which the scanner goobered up a bit) and the ecru snowflakes are done with a soft Hi-lights thread.

But, you know, I really do like it. At the very least, when I look at it now, I'll be reminded to use more blackwork patterns in my future pieces.

So......Ho, Ho, Ho, cross this one off the list..... and on to the next!