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!!

 

No Easter just 4th of July

Calendar wise up next I should have Easter to post about.  I spent several hours digging through my tatting boxes and photos trying to find my Easter project. I finally had to come to the conclusion that I didn’t make or send any out. It is quite frightening that I seriously can’t remember why or what happened but the fact remains that I was lame and missed a holiday. I did find a couple motifs that I started that may have been a start of Easter but I can’t post them because they will eventually go out to family.

So I guess up next we have Independence Day.  It looks like I made 15 of these but I only sent out 9 of them. I feel like this year has been a terrible year where I started with the best of intentions but never followed through or finished any of my projects.  It seems like I made lots of motifs but then didn’t get them sent out. 

I tried to find where I got the pattern for the tatted motif from but I can’t seem to find it.  It makes me feel real badly when I can’t give credit to the artist that created a pattern that I used. I am fairly certain that I found the pattern on pintrest and the pattern had a picture of the final project with the pattern behind it. I used artiste thread in size #10 and the color is blueberry. I remember I had a big problem with this pattern with missed joins and I ended up ripping a bunch of stitches out which was not pleasant because trying to open a closed ring that doesn’t have a picot in it is not very easy. I didn’t love the way this pattern turned out but I couldn’t find another pattern and I was in a hurry to try to get them done.  

As for the pattern for the little beaded doodad , I have had most of my patterns so long that I can’t remember where I got them from. I have been beading for over 25 years and I have a huge accumulation of holiday ornaments that I hang on a display for each holiday and more often than not that is where I get my ideas for the tatted accents. 

Now the card however is solely my husband’s idea! It is kind of an inside family joke. My family has plenty of firework stories gone wrong and this was just his little idea of a reminder of those cautionary tales.