Happy Thanksgiving or Black Friday!!

 

Happy Thanksgiving or should I say Happy Black Friday. I guess that isn’t even correct considering that Black Friday has been going on for weeks now as far as the stores go. We had a kind of last-minute Thanksgiving because our plans kept changing. We were supposed to have several friends over including one friend flying in from out of town for a weekend of food and music recording but we ended up doing the socially responsible thing and cancelling due to Covid numbers going up again. So we finally ended up doing a small Thanksgiving dinner on Friday with just me and my husband, his son and his girlfriend.

Once again I am ashamed to announce that my holiday cards got sent out late which is really stupid because I actually had them done fairly early. We try to put a personal note in every card so that can get a bit difficult to come up with those so that’s a part of the reason why we hesitated to get these finished and in the mail. Another big reason why I drug my feet is because I am not really happy with the way these turned out. Probably the biggest reason why I don’t like them is because these are my second attempt at creating my own pattern and I am super critical of myself no matter what I do.

 

I didn’t spend a lot of time trying to tweak this pattern to make it right because I tend to “slip down a rabbit hole" way too easily now days and it is a very slippery slope indeed, not to mention it’s also very long. Also, as I mentioned several times before, nothing ever tends to be good enough so, should I try to make myself happy I would never finish. I got the idea for the feathers while cruising around pintrest when I stumbled across a dragonfly pattern that you can find here. The body is just a pattern that I am sure is found in lots of places and in lots of patterns.

 

These are the first time I haven’t put a little beaded do dad with them partly because I am completely running out of ideas for thanksgiving and partly because I figured since I added beads to them already that would probably be enough.

 I used South Maid 100% acrylic fiber called fudge brown. This thread was a real pain in the butt to work with especially when it came to closing rings. In fact I broke this thread several times when I was doing the split rings for the head, although to be fair its partly due to the fact that I was pulling the  stitches pretty tightly trying to make them even. This is one pattern that I actually used a picot gauge on (just a big wood stick like doctors use for tongue depressors) because I have a hard time making really large picots. I actually made 18 of these because we anticipated having people here for the weekend but by the time I came to trying to get them in the mail I only sent out 13 of them. In fact some of them haven’t made it to the mail yet because we have been working on a project for Christmas and I was just going to send them all at once but the project is taking much long than anticipated and they are still not ready to get in the mail yet. They really should have all gone in the mail already because they are advent calendars for the grand kids so like everything else now days they are going to be late getting them.

 Anyway I hope everyone had a great thanksgiving, I know the last year has been extremely difficult for most people but I hope you all could find at least a little something to be thankful for!

Thanksgiving

We ended up getting a huge snowstorm that has caused lots of grief on lots of levels.  We ended up getting  at least 24 inches in less than 2 days. It is super heavy snow so trying to get unburied has been an ordeal.  On top of that we have gotten rain and then freezing at night so everything is like an ice skating rink in places where the snow has been cleaned off.  Thankfully the only real damage we have suffered so far has been extremely sore back and legs and the snow pulled off several gutters and flashing off the house but so far we have survived.

The next holiday I need to get caught up on is Thanksgiving.  I had an idea of beading a turkey body and using a piece of tatting for the “feather part”.  Due to the short amount of time between  the next couple of holidays I needed to hurry to get on the project.  My brain power is pretty much just being taken up with dealing with the problems at work and the everyday task of just trying to survive so I didn’t have time to try to invent a pattern or pour over the internet looking for one .  I was going through past projects and found, by happy mistake, that I could repurpose one of Mark Meyers , aka Tatman, patterns to work with the concept I was going for. I used this same pattern for my Thanksgiving 2016 cards, it's called back to school apple. I had my bobbin wound with left over thread from last years thanksgiving project  so I just used that thread which is Lizbeth called falling leaves in  size 10.

 I ended up making 16 of these but only ended up sending 9 of them out.  I have been so late in getting these out lately that I am embarrassed so I end up not even sending them out at all so I end up with extra motifs and have no idea what to do with them.

The card idea was my husbands this time,  I always come up with the picture and I have recruited him to help with the sayings.