It's a new year, 2026 is upon us, and all the usual rituals have to be followed: start the new planner (I use Kindle Scribe now since last year) and fill out all the recurring events, hang the new wall calendar, book the next summer's caravan holiday, take down the tree, hoover up all the needles I can find (we still come across some even months later) and put away the christmas ornaments etc. The house seems rather bare with all the ornaments gone, and I can see that I need to dust. We didn't do anything on New Year's Eve but we did stay up to stick our heads out of the attic skylight at midnight to watch the tremendous amount of fireworks going off all over town, very impressive.
DS has gone home so I have reinstated my weaving station in his old room. I've woven about a meter of the sock yarn fabric and am wondering what I was thinking when I warped on 3 meters. I am planning to sew with the finished fabric but do I need three meters worth of identical bags and pouches? I will keep going for now. The fabric is fairly narrow, only about 30 cm wide.
I've been stitching on my Christmas cross stitch sampler most nights and have reached the bottom half. I also found an empty frame in a skip which I think will fit it nicely. I've already seen another Christmas sampler design that I am thinking of doing next year so perhaps this is going to turn into an annual tradition.
I am almost to the toe of my first Christmas sock, it was nice to have something seasonal to knit when my eyes got too tired for the cross stitch. This yarn has an amazingly long repeat.
And I dismembered my old red spool wreath that had lost its shape and managed to pull most of the hot glue off the ornaments. Then I re-glued them onto the star wreath that I bought at Hobbycraft last week. It turned out pretty good, it actually looks more festive than the old round wreath.
I've pieced all six blocks of the Gail Pan embroidered blocks BOM now, and have been stitching on the EPP hexies that decorate each block - I just have one more block of hexies to do now. And I have been plugging away on the Baptist Fan pattern for the Checkered Dresden Quilt. There are 12.5 fans along each row, and each one requires picking up and putting down five circle rulers. I am trying to do a row a day, it ranges from meditative to quite mechanically tedious, but it is looking really good. Some of my overlaps are still pretty bad but there are more decent ones now. I plan to stitch this pattern on three quilts starting with this, my least favourite, so hopefully I will be better when I get to the quilts I like more.
With the Gail Pan project temporarily off my cutting table, I have started work on one of the Japanese kits that I bought in Tokyo at Sakura Horikiri last year. This craft may be called Kinusaiga but I'm not sure, it's basically wrapping precut foam shapes in synthetic silk fabric, then gluing the shapes together to make a colourful 3D picture or item. This project is quite complex, it is a decorated 'hagoita' or wooden paddle used at New Year's. The paddle is laden with all sorts of auspicious elements from Japanese culture. There are a gazillion tiny pieces and it's all in Japanese, thank goodness for Google Translate.
In papercrafts this week, I made another cute little book from a free printable and video tutorial by VectoriaDesigns. It is stitched and bound like a real book, very cute. It's not hard, I encourage you to download the printables and give it a go! I also finally finished the journal I was working on - now to see if I am actually going to write in it.
