A Bit of Stitching and a Bit of Home

state flower pattern by Aunt Martha

It's usually this time of year when I am missing home the most. I used to love lying in the backyard hammock as our dog Georgie, an airdale, napped beneath it and I would read there once school got out and watch as my mom planted and weeded her vegetable garden. Well, sometimes my lethargic teenage self was roped into helping out with all sorts of farm chores but I was bound and determined to spend as much of my free time as possible reading in that hammock or in my favorite tree in the lane behind the pasture and sometimes I daydream about how nice it would be to be able to slip back into one of those summer days, if only for a moment.

I thought a lot about those summer days as I stitched up this piece with it's apple blossoms and state banner. It was a project I started long ago and far away and one of those things that's been lingering on my sewing to-do list for quite a while. I know, it's shameful to be finally finishing something in June that was originally going to be a christmas gift but hey, when your job is to stitch for a living, the personal projects sometimes just have to be put on the back burner. The finished pillow will now go live with my parent's in their knotty pine living room—fitting right? It doesn't quite go with my usual style but I do like it and think I might do something like it if I had a cabin in the woods or on the great lakes (definitely on my list of next to impossible dreams).

Can I just add how much I love the stem stitch for outlining organic things like leaves and petals and flames? I find I need to put a little more concentration into it than I do with the backstitch (used on the banner) or the split stitch (used for the veins and twigs), but it is totally worth it for things like that. I also brought the blossoms to the forefront by using all six strands and only three on the elements that I wanted to push into the background. This is a great way to give depth to any embroidered piece as well as more of a dynamic texture.

Ahem....what I do not recommend though is hoping for seams that match up perfectly when sewing with plaid. I ended up using my seam ripper a few more times than I would care to admit and had to settle for getting the lines of the plaid to match up as closely as possible, but not quite spot on in some places. If anyone knows how that is accomplished, please let me know because the darn stuff kind of makesmewanttopullmyhairoutandthrowabonifidetempertamtrum. Ok, ok I did not loose it over plaid (and I suppose I must admit to battling my inner perfectionist) but I was briefly tempted and am thinking that taking a bit of time to read in a hammock afterwards might not be such a bad idea!

a few of my favorite -christmas- things

i wanted to be productive yesterday but then i decided to be completely lazy instead and it was a beautiful thing! it felt so good to just have a day of no responsibilities and to wrap presents and soak in the magic of the first snow of the year. crazy that it took this long to get any here but we now have a good inch on the ground which definitely qualifies as real snowfall in my book. today though, i want to dive right in and share with you some of my favorite christmas decorations and traditions:



we tend to get a little competitive in our house with the decorating of sugar cookies. i don't have  any fancy tools..we really just decide what frosting colors we want and do what we can with a butter knife and everyone sits around the table to decorate them together. i use my nana's recipe that her nana used before her every year...it just wouldn't be christmas without them!



this knit advent calendar of little hats and mittens has to be one of my favorite decorations. if i was a more accomplished knitter, i would have made it myself but i'm still learning so when i saw it in a catalog (i think it was garnet hill a few years ago) i snatched it right up. after gaining a few pounds the first year we filled it up, i decided to start using the same (perpetually unwrapped) mini candy canes each year...shh, don't tell!




the two photos on top are some of my favorite vintage christmas decorations. some of them are so fragile like the little stocking that i still have not quite figured out the best way to display them. i am definitely a classic-retro christmas kind of girl though when it comes to decorating: big bright lights, celluloid, brenda lee, sparkly old icicle ornaments, you name it.

many of our family's decorations that haven't been passed down come from a place called bronner's in michigan, like the advent wreath there in the bottom right. it is in a town called frankenmuth, not far from where i grew up, and is where many german-lutheran farmers settled back in the day (i.e. my family ancestry). if you haven't been there or heard of it i should warn you that it is kind of crazy and the whole town has gotten really built-up and commercial over the years, unfortunately. it's still amazing though and i cherish it..it's basically a winter wonderland, a christmas city. the first time i took my husband there a few years ago he got a little freaked out by how over-the-top it is and i, having grew up with it as a normal thing, just didn't understand why it was weird. i can kind of see it now, haha, but i still love the place as the old lutheran church, the biergartens, and zehnder's restaurant have a lot of family history attached to them. goodness, i am getting hungry now just thinking about it!

i hope you've enjoyed this little peek into our home, it's fun to share all the little things that make the holidays merry and bright.

p.s. i almost forgot...saw this index of free gift tags on odeedoh the other day. there are some new ones and others have been floating around the internets for a while, but they are all pretty sa-weet!