End of the year

Well, it's nearly the end of 2010 so this will probably be my last post for the year. Wow, hard to believe it's nearly 2011. How did we get this far? I remember when the world was worried about Y2K! Anyway, I always save a few vacation days so that I can take the week between Christmas and New Year's. Originally it was to be home when our daughter was on school break and too young to be by herself. Now it's so I can have time with her while she's home from college. Hubby had a long weekend but had to go back to work today. :(

So Meg and I are enjoying down time. Today except for shoveling, we did not leave the house at all, and I went back to bed for a couple of hours after hubby left at 5:15am. What luxury! In between taking care of dishes and laundry, she read and I stitched. Finally completed the backstitching on the section of Winter Fairy that I have done (p. 1 of 4). I have to order some Kreinik threads for the wing backstitching, as it is not available around here.

Here are two pictures. One is of WF as she is today. I'm excited to start page 2 tomorrow. The other picture is of Meg with the picture I stitched for her for Christmas. It says "Silly Socks are Toe-tally Awesome!". As you can see, Meg loves silly socks, and she was very pleased with her gift.

Happy New Year, everyone! I hope that 2011 will be a fantastic year for each of you.

I put all other sewing aside for the last couple of weeks so that I could make my gift tag for the annual office Secret Santa exchange. I do a tag every year; it's become a tradition. At first I did some complex paper tags, but then I changed to cross stitch on plastic canvas. The last couple of years I have added beading. I always make them double-sided so they can be hung as ornament. This year the tag is completely beaded. It looks very nice, but it's a lot of added work. Cross-stitch is zip-zip, but when you bead you have to pause at every cross to catch a bead on your needle. I lost one whole evening of stitching because I hit the bead container wrong and spent the rest of the evening painstakingly rescuing beads from the carpeting. Sheesh! Anyway, it's done now and I think it came out well. The person whose name I pulled this year has a 1 1/2 year old baby, so I thought this Santa tag would be nice.