No thanksgiving and Christmas with elves

 It has been another crazy couple of months. I am sure the holiday season is pretty crazy for a lot of people but I am one of the people who really dislikes Christmas. It is such a commercialized holiday and there is such high stress about shopping and finding gifts for one day of the year, people running around all stressed and mean and ignorant that I would just as soon forget the whole thing! 

For thanksgiving this year we invited a friend over for a simple turkey dinner.  We don't have any family left that lives in our area and our friends' family also all lives out of town so it was great to spend the day with adopted family! 

As far as my holiday cards go I am super ashamed to admit that we didn't even get them sent out. I really had to stop and think as to the reason because I have the cards and the tatted dodads done. The simple explanation for not getting them in the mail is because I was working on getting a family activity/gift together and i had hoped to send them together so I could save on shipping. The postage for my tatted cards have gone up to $0.88 each so I was going to just ship the cards with the holiday project I was working on. I underestimated how long it would take to get the project together so by the time I got the project all ready to ship it was weeks past thanksgiving so we decided to just keep the thanksgiving doodads for next year.

The family project we were working on were elf on the shelf kits. We did elves for all our family members including several accessories for the elves and introduction letters to go with them. We have been missing family like crazy so we came up with the idea to send elves out and we set up a facebook page so that family members could post what their elf was up to. it was our small way to try to share in the holiday season even though we couldn't be together. I am hoping to set up another blog to share my othe craft ideas so keep an eye out for that blog to see the complete elf kit! Not only didn't the thanksgiving cards get sent out the elves were really late in getting in the mail because it took forever to round up the accessories i was looking for. The shelves are bare around here as far as food and craft items go so I had to hit several stores in a 30 mile radius to gather everything I needed. I know this is a very poor excuse but I wanted all the kits to be the same. 

For as crazy as the last couple of months have been, I am pleased to announce that most of my Christmas cards actually made it in the mail on time! Most of the cards for the family got put in the mail with the elves. I was still working on the tatted dodads for some of the cards so I am ashamed to admit that some of them didn't make it in the mail yet! I had been working on an Christmas gift for my kids that I have been working on for months that has been beating me up. Between trying to find the fabric and trim and being scared to finish them I am still trying to get them done. My plan was to send the cards with that project but they are still not done yet!

Part of the reason why they are not done yet is because of the craziness of the last couple of weeks! We had a bad snow storm come through our area that dumped 10-12 inches of snow in a matter of days and soon after that we had a terrible cold snap that froze our water pipes. We also ran out of propane in the middle of all that. We had called for a delivery well before we were completely empty but it took the propane company over 3 weeks to get us more propane which means we were completely out of propane for over a week and during the coldest week of the year so far! Propane is our only form of heat in our living area which is a fairly large area with vaulted ceilings so that part of the house never got over 55 degrees. 

We had also been working a ton at the casino mixing bands. We worked every single weekend (some of them even 3 days in a row) since the weeks before thanksgiving right up till a couple of days after New years day! The day after new years both my husband and I got super sick. We are not sure if it was Covid or not because we were unable to find a place to get tested and couldn't find an inexpensive test in the mail. I can tell you that I can't ever remember being that sick for that long. I literally spent the last couple of weeks either in bed or sitting on the couch not doing a single thing.  I didn't even feel well enough to read or do any tatting so that should tell you how bad it was! I also had a terrible UTI at the same time so between shoveling snow, dealing with no water, having no heat and being super sick  it has  been a super miserable last couple of weeks.  Needless to say, so far, 2022 has not been a great year!

Anyway, here are my Christmas cards for 2021. The cards took forever to put together because the die cut that I wanted to use didn't cut the construction paper out very well so I had to “weed out” every single hole of the doily/wreath and in some cases I had to aslo cut out some of the holes. 

The tatted wreath came from an idea I got from a picture I had saved from some site I ran across a long while ago. I think the picture said it was a snowflake but when I went to try to find the site again I couldn't find it. The picture wasn't really clear so I had to tweak the counts a couple times before it would lay flat. I decided to add beads to the piece because I knew I wouldn't have time to do beaded doddads with this one. I used artiste size 10 crochet thread called grass. I used almost the entire ball to make 16 of these but I only ended up sending 11 of them out.  It was a super easy pattern to remember and the thread was very easy to work with.  I probably broke a couple tatters cardinal rule and hot glued the ribbon on top. I have never used glue in tatting before so I have no idea if the ribbon is going to stay but I needed to get these done quickly because I needed to get them in the mail with the elves which were super late as it was.

On a little more positive note, I am well underway to having my Valentine tatting dodads done. I still need to come up with a card idea and get those done but hopefully I can get those done quickly and I will be able to get them in the mail in time for Valentines Day.  Wish me luck!

PS This post has actually been written for over a week I had just forgotten to hit the puplish button! What a stupey!!

Merry Christmas, Happy New Year or whatever!!

 

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year or like it says in our holiday cards..whatever holiday this is posted on!

 

I have some good news and some not so good news about my holiday doodads.  The good news is some of them got sent out unfortunately, the really bad news is that I still haven’t sent out some of them to my family members mostly  because I have still been trying to decide what to send for gifts.(Several reasons for this but most of them revolve around me sucking at life right now) My plan was to get these in the mail super early but, as you can see with the cards that were already printed out from  last year, that wouldn’t make much sense.  But we finally decided about a week before Christmas that we would send them out and just hand write in the cards that “it may be a Christmas miracle that they may actually arrive before Christmas “.

 

 It has been another extremely difficult Christmas. First and foremost, I just really hate the holiday for several reasons. My stress level always goes through the roof around Christmas but this year has been beyond stress. Add the whole 2020 thing, very little money coming in because I haven’t been working for so long, plus not being able to spend it with family, pretty much equates to a terrible holiday. It was definitely very difficult not to travel and spend it with family especially because our new grand babies are getting old enough to know what Christmas is about and the hubby actually had some time off. But we did the socially responsible thing and stayed put.

 

 

I am going to post this even though some of them still haven’t been sent out because I have actually been working on these stupey ornaments for several years now. I have talked about why in previous blog posts but I guess the short reason is I suck! I had started making these for 2018 Christmas but they didn’t get sent out that year, so I continued to keep making a few more for 2019 but I got super overwhelmed that Christmas as well and was still embarrassed to be sending out such tiny motifs with super simple beaded doodads that I didn’t send them out then either.

So that brings us to 2020…I had made 30 of these because I had planned on giving them to the people I work with and the people my husband works with as well as all our family. But as of right now I still haven’t been able to find a job yet and my husband has been working from home so we only will be using 19 this year so I guess we will still have a start for some people next year.

 

 The Angel comes from a pattern that can be found all over pintrest so it is a bit difficult to find out who actually started the original pattern, I am pretty sure it is a pattern by Patrizia Pirocca as that is the name that is watermarked in the picture that also has the stitch counts on it.  I changed the  count on the pattern and added picots to try to make them a bit bigger. I made the picots different lengths on each one I did so each angel actually looks a bit different . The pattern also had a bead as the head but I knew that I was going to be mailing these out so I made the head with thread. 

 

 The motifs are small enough that they really didn’t need to be starched but since I used white thread and apparently didn’t wash my hands often enough, some of them didn’t stay so white so I used gold glitter glue to cover that fact. Since I used gold I wanted to put a gold hanger on them but I couldn’t find any so I decided to make my own ornament hanger. That worked out pretty well because I was able to add the beaded star in a different way than I normally do. The white thread I used was some crochet thread that was not very nice to work with but I just kept working with it anyway. Please don’t ask me why because every answer I would think to come up with isn’t very flattering toward me!

I guess I will just try to focus on the good news that some of these actually got sent out, the holiday is over and the next couple of holidays are my favorite. I am getting close to having the doodads for Valentines done so please join me in crossing fingers that they will make it in the mail in a timely fashion! I have been pouring over the internet (thanks to all you bloggers out there for providing inspiration) trying to come up with an idea for St Pats but so far it has been a solid week since I have worked on any project at all (that is a terrible, terrible admission and one I am totally not proud of, not to mention it is aweful for my sanity). Please wish me luck with coming up with something before I completely loose any sanity that I have left! Thanks!!