Last night of Christmas ........

yep.... tomorrow I'm going to take it down.... don't really want to ...and usually try to leave it up for my little old neighbour who is Ukrainian and celebrates about January the 8th I think.... but,  Greg is making noises about it being up far too long....sigh.............. oh, well, this year I put it up earlier and got to enjoy it much longer than we did last year.

The little guys on the couch will miss it too.... no more sparklies to admire.... I'll have to find them something interesting to do or to look at.  ..otherwise they'll cause trouble... I know those guys.

Today I put away the rest of Christmas... moved a lot of boxes around in the storage area... tossed a few and found new ones..hopefully all will now fit better into the niche I allow for the festive stuff.  Then, need to re-organize the whole storage area ... it would be nice to toss and purge things...but..I know darn well the second I do...I'll need whatever it is I threw out.  Forget it.  I'll just save it.  All of it.  Somebody else can deal with all of it when I'm long gone.  And good luck to 'em...hahahhahha......

So, .....more snow tomorrow.  We have record high piles of it already...but, a new cold front is blowing in and they are forecasting between 5 and 35 cm... of the new white stuff...oh...goody.... my biceps and forearms are getting a great workout... actually my hands feel it too.... oh, and my back ..and my legs..and my ...hahahha.... yeh..... I know....

Still have some cranberries left and must make some chutney...

Might just head out to stock up on grub ...in case.... don't want to get caught short if the weather takes a total nosedive... have to be ready for anything.

Goodbye (for now) Christmas stuff....

 'night, 'night little mousies... time to sleep til December now....

Merry Christmas!

Bernie settled in early on Christmas Eve to see the sparkly tree.... of course, it wasn't sparkly when he first got there and settled in to his favourite viewing spot.  It was still daytime.  I think he was a bit over eager.

Nonetheless, he did get the best seat in the house. And, soon...was rewarded for his patience.

oh, wow...........

ooooh....... yeh...........

uhm, Bernie.............

It's bed time, man......... c'mon............

Show and tell..

Finally!! I've had to keep it under wraps 'til now because my stitching buddy Maggi hadn't yet received it ...and she does check out this blog every so often... I didn't want to spoil my little surprise.

Remember the 'master sheet' of fabric I made from various bits of other fabrics?  Well, here is something else I decided to make from it..instead of just pincushions.... a little Christmas stocking.

I cut a design in light cardboard and moved it around over various parts of my sheet of fabrc..to decide on the best area to begin.  Tried bits of trim and got a feel for how it might look when finished.  Of course, it always changes midstream...but, that's fine... it's mostly just to find a great place to start.

See?  It did change ...I decided on a totally different area, but that's fine.... I'm sure nothing is ever set in stone when doing handwork.

I figured out a little bell in cross stitch and used some seed beads for a clanger... made some gold stars and tried a few French Knots with single strand of thread...  that was tricky...the gals on our stitching Flickr group heard about it and offered suggestions to tame unruly gold threads.... thanks ladies!
An edge of buttonhole lace on the real piece of lace on the heel, and a few green and red threads for holly and berries.. and, as they say....et voilà!
I did find a perfect ribbon instead of the cord to hang it ...but, no, I did not remember to take a final photo of the finished product.  Too eager to get it on its way to Maggi's house.... ...

I love my own little rendition of some Christmas bells....  here you can see them close up before I added the lace to the heel.

And, because I was so pumped with my finished stocking...I just had to do another ...and it was easy to finish on time as I had already done plenty of hand embroidery on what I thought would be another pincushion....but, for some reason...I was having big trouble deciding what to put on the left side of this piece of stitchery...total mental block it seemed....... .until...I looked at it through my "stocking" viewfinder instead of this "pincushion" block ... ...hahahha....all of a sudden.. a stocking it became!!

The three large rose looking flowers are actually bits cut from the piece of lace fabric I won from Karen a while ago.... I added some bullion stitches around them...and of course, had a lot of my favs...tiny Forget-Me-Knot flowers....

Once I decided it was becoming a Christmas stocking I had to add some gold stars to mine as well... copying the first Christmas stocking... and found a bit more ribbon to hang it ....

Directly onto our tree it went.

Makin' babies....

... maybe I had some of you there...hahhaha.... don't ya just love deceptive titles?  Sort of a regular on the news and great for selling scandal rags near the checkouts at the grocery store.

I'm making my walnut mice babies...that's what I'm really up to ... for the tree....and to give away.  They are pretty cute and almost everybody wants one for their own tree... why wouldn't they?
                                                                               

Remember last year when I was panicking that I would be buying a Safeway BBQ'd chicken for Christmas dinner ? ...(turned out I didn't have to resort to that, but, it was close) .... because this was where my oven was still sitting on the 21st of December  ..... in the dining room!  Because the cabinet guys couldn't get things right.  Not this year.  All is done ...but, now...I don't have my new dining room table and chairs..oh, well...we still have the old one....and I ain't taking it out til I see the new one in the back of a delivery truck!  which may be first week in January...or not......