…my true love gave to me: a flock of birds to hang on the tree!
Every year, Satsuma Street releases a new entry in the “12 Days of Christmas” ornament series, and every year I buy the pattern but don’t get around to stitching it until the following year. I’ve got enough stuff going on by the time the holiday season rolls around without trying to race through another project. All this to say: while this pattern was released last year, it’s new-to-me for this year.
Calling birds…get it? I love a good pun.
I think my favourite detail on the ornament is the rotary dial on the phone:
…although I wonder how that works with only eight buttons (finger holes?).
Along with the previous three ornaments:
Gosh darn, there are a lot of birds in that song. Didn’t Alfred Hitchcock make a movie about dense ornithological populations? At least they’re cheery-looking.
…Halloween, of course! I’ve been having fun getting my annual fix of Bobby “Boris” Pickett, sending Halloween-themed happy mail, and fitting in a bit of spooky stitching!
First up, “Eye Scream” (get it? Get it?):
That poor pumpkin looks so upset…but then, I think I’d be, too.
Ermahgerd! It’s a haunted hearse!
Both ornaments are from Satsuma Street kits I got as a gift. I didn’t think to take pictures of the backs, but I used black glitter felt to finish them off so they’ll sparkle from either side as they hang from my (strictly hypothetical) Halloween tree. The hanging loops are glow-in-the-dark Kreinik fine braid, because I love me some glow-in-the-dark.
…my true love gave to me: a meme that comes straight from TV!
It was quite by accident that I found this pattern for a Christmas’d version of Homer Simpson moving silently through Ned Flanders’ hedge, but knew right away that I had to stitch it.
Luckily, my local needlework shop (always support your local needlework shop if you have a choice!) had the requisite Christmas green aida cloth, so I was able to get started on him right away.
He fits perfectly in a 4″ hoop!
The backstitch really creates the illusion of the hedge, and the two little French knots for his pupils are the finishing touch.
…my true love gave to me: a French hen to go with my two turtle doves and partridge in a pear tree!
By the time Satsuma Street released their holiday designs last year, I was done with taking on last-minute crafting projects. (Excuse me while I snicker behind my hand.) That didn’t stop me from buying the charts, though: one of them was the third installment in the 12 Days of Christmas series, and since I had stitched the first two last year it was a given I had to do this one as well.
Mon dieu! A French hen!
I didn’t think to take a picture of the back, but once I was finished stitching and attaching the beads and sequins, I glued it to glittery white felt so it will shimmer no matter how the lights catch it.
The four calling birds have been released, so I’ve got at least one project for next year lined up already.
…my true love gave to me: a card with a greeting merry!
For the second year in a row, I signed up for the Christmas Card swap on Lettuce Craft, because who doesn’t like getting a little festive mail? Or mail in general, really?
Last year, I kept things fairly simple with a bit of embossing powder and die-cut messages (trust me, it’s simpler than it might sound), but this year I apparently lost all sense of reason when I saw the Christmas Trees box card on SVGCuts. This had presence, drama, and a great reason to play with some fun patterned papers that mysteriously find their way into one’s stash but don’t get used for being “too busy”.
Speaking of patterned papers: trying to decide on a colour scheme was pretty much impossible. In the end, I made three cards in a traditional red-and-green theme, and the other three using fun mid-century pinks and teals. The traditional set got gold stars and ornament hangers, and I used silver for the mid-century set. I stamped the back of each card with a fun, festive message that still left plenty of room to sign. The pattern came with a little train to attach to the inside front of the card, but I left it out to make things all about the trees.
I wouldn’t say that making six 3D cards was a mistake, but it sure was an undertaking. The actual assembly wasn’t so bad – I hit upon a rhythm and system that got me down to about 30 minutes of gluing and positioning per card – but cutting out all the different pieces and keeping them sorted until I could put them together was a challenge. I started by making little piles for each card, starting with the solid coloured base and then setting subsequent stars, tree bits, etc. on top, and then putting each little group into its own envelope to wait patiently to be glued together.
The other challenge came when it was time to mail them. When folded flat, they’re 7 inches square (or as square as you can be with irregular edges), which is bigger than most envelope sizes commonly found in stores. Sure, there are 9″ x 12″ envelopes for letter-sized paper, but that felt like overkill. I found some 7.5″ x 10″ “catalogue envelopes” at Staples which fit the bill nicely. And then…I worried that they would get bent in the mail, so I made little cardboard sleeves to give them a bit of stiffness. Some people helicopter-parent their kids; I do it to my crafts.
Luckily, my over-packaging seems to have worked: four out of six partners have received them so far, and they’re standing just as straight as they did before mailing.
…my true love gave to me: some Grinchy little guys for the tree!
In unpacking the Christmas decorations this year, I came to the realization that wow, there were a lot of cross-stitched pieces in there, and I might have a problem. There were cross-stitched representations of the cats, typographical hoops, and a whole bunch of ornaments stitched on perforated paper. (And that’s not counting the older ones, stitched on flexible vinyl Aida, that are blocky and weird by contemporary design standards.)
Of course, even if I had (re)discovered this sooner, it likely wouldn’t have stopped me from working up these guys. I had had the pattern in my Etsy favourites for a long time, and finally had the chance to stitch it.
Because the design is so small, and because my Q-snaps are…not that small, it was easier to cut a piece of fabric (iridescent Aida for the win!) large enough to accommodate three repeats of the pattern than to struggle and curse a piece sized for one. I folded the strip into thirds, found the centre of each third, and set to stitchin’.
When they were done I washed and pressed the whole big piece, then cut the thirds apart and mounted each one in a 3″ wooden hoop. I had briefly debated painting the hoops somehow (or maybe spray them with glitter spray paint) but thought the understated look worked well for someone who stole Christmas before promptly returning it. He’s definitely adopted a pre-epiphany stance here.
A friend has called dibs on one, and I’ll be keeping one, leaving me with an extra to hang somewhere or keep up my sleeve as a crafty add-on to a gift.
Ever since I first started playing around with heat transfer vinyl, the idea of doing multi-coloured/layered designs was always in the back of my mind. Like so many other things that live back there for “some day”, this was dismissed as being too complicated, and what if it didn’t work? That would be a waste of perfectly good vinyl!
I was finally spurred into action when I saw this hoodie on Modcloth. So cute! So cat-iful! The price was a bit hard to swallow, though. And once the price caught in my throat, I found other reasons to not buy it: with the graphic on the back, people might not be able to see and appreciate it to the full extent possible; they only had a handful of sizes left and were still asking nearly-full price; that’s still a crazy amount of money for a hoodie that’s got a strong seasonal vibe.
An Etsy search turned up the exact same image as an SVG file for a fraction of the price. (Note: searching for “pumpkin butt” generates a lot of hits for kits to, ahem, paint your infant’s backside orange and turn the resulting print into a pumpkin. Shudder. “Cat butt pumpkin” was a lot more helpful.) I gleefully informed my Crafting Buddy (who is also my Baking Buddy) that I had found our layered vinyl project. He said he wasn’t sure that he’d want a big pumpkin cat butt on the front of his shirt…”but I could see it as a smaller image on the chest, maybe”. Back to my search, where I found something appropriately pop-culture and masculine for his Halloween finery. Once I got the images resized appropriately, I cut out one colour/layer at a time and hoped against hope this would work.
We started with his shirt because the pieces were a bit smaller and easier to wrangle.
This is the back side i.e. the part that gets placed against the shirt. I learned an invaluable lesson: if you’re going to weed everything ahead of time, make sure you have wax paper or something similar between your pieces, or else the carrier sheet will stick to the sheet immediately below and maybe even start peeling the vinyl off.
We started by dry-fitting (cold-fitting, sine this was before heat pressing?) the pieces to see how they would look.
It took some careful placement, but we got the remaining two layers of the pumpkin lined up. The ghosts should probably be a little bit closer to the pumpkin, but we moved them over to centre the design overall.
It looks pretty good! (The colour variance you’re seeing in the black is just from the heat press, and isn’t a permanent feature.)
Once we had one under our belts, we assembled my shirt. It was slightly more awkward because of the larger pieces of vinyl.
We got things lined up pretty well, though!
Now we can check “layered vinyl” off our crafty bucket list. I don’t know how often I’ll do it, but it’s a nice trick to have up my sleeve.
Last summer, Michaels* had included, in one of their daily promotional emails, a link to a tutorial to make a tie-dyed Canada Day t-shirt. My tie-dye buddy and I (he’s also my baking buddy; truly, he’s a jack of all trades) bought white t-shirts and a bottle of red dye, and…never got around to applying one to the other. Whoops.
Fast-forward to this year: back in May, I was putting a file at work in abeyance for two months, which took me to July 1. Hey – we had time to get them done this year! We found last year’s stash still in its plastic bag from the store, and I set to finding the tutorial from last year. It was underwhelming, to say the least.
Step 2
Follow the directions on the package for best results and dye patterns.
Really, Michaels*?
The package directions weren’t much better, and didn’t seem to offer the pattern shown in the picture, so we decided to dispense with their “rules” and choose our own pattern adventure. He wanted his to look like a Canadian flag (-ish), and I opted for a classic swirl, hoping against hope that I wasn’t going to look like a peppermint candy when all was said and done.
After a quick dunk in soda ash, they were ready for dyeing. Besides the single bottle of red we had bought last year, we found a couple other partial bottles of red in our stash and thought, “Why not?” I don’t know that it made a huge difference, but I’d like to think they lent a certain depth of colour.
Rinse time! His turned out beautifully, but I should have gotten down into the folds of mine a little bit more with the dye. But I can’t be too upset, for two reasons: 1) if I had wanted a solid red shirt, I would have bought one, and 2) the swirl lines came out well, and don’t look like Christmas candy. I’ll call that a win. If I squint, it looks a bit like a burst of fireworks, which is certainly a propos.
But wait, there’s more! The original tutorial had “Canada” in a pretty unremarkable font, straight across the chest. We found a design we liked on the Silhouette Design Store and edited it so we were left with this:
I found some inexpensive placement guides on Amazon to help centre designs on t-shirts and make sure they’re a reasonable distance from the collar, and the adult-sized one proved to be immeasurably (or actually, measurably) helpful here.
The final product(s):
Thanks for looking! 🙂
*Is anyone else bothered by the fact that the founder of that craft chain opted to not add an apostrophe and make it possessive? It takes everything I have not to spell it as “Michael’s”. And every time I see “Michaels”, I expect to see messieurs Keaton, Caine, Bolton, etc. all lined up, rather than aisles of craft supplies.
My latest kitchen experiment was borne out of wanting to avoid the restaurants on Mother’s Day. It’s right up there with Valentine’s Day as far as overcrowding and the antithesis of a relaxing, enjoyable meal. Luckily, I had recently borrowed The Superfun Times Vegan Holiday Cookbook from my local library, and had tons of inspiration.
I opted for almond-crusted French toast, and although “crusted” isn’t a super-appetizing word (it makes me think of the top of the ketchup bottle), this was delicious! It’s not my recipe to reprint, but it’s similar to this – only vegan, so coconut milk for thickening instead of eggs – although there’s no cinnamon in the mixture. Instead, add in some orange zest: the recipe called for a teaspoon, but I chose to zest until my orange was zest-less, because a little extra flavour never hurt anybody.
Speaking of unappetizing: there was something a little off-putting about soggy bread with almond slices stuck to it. I got all of my bread dipped and almond-ed while I waited for my pan to heat up, and seriously had my doubts before the first side turned golden brown.
But before long, we were cooking (ha! In more ways than one).
In a moment of inspiration, I peeled the orange who had so bravely given its zest to the cause and served it on the side as a juicy little amuse-bouche. Who knew that citrus could be so tasty outside of the usual season?
This couldn’t have turned out better. The orange flavour really came though in the toast, and the almonds provided a wonderful crunch. The best part? It takes less than half and hour to make, so this is a lot of impressiveness for such a short amount of time. I made some for a friend for lunch the following weekend, and it tastes just as good when you’re not trying to avoid crowds.
I can’t remember when I first encountered them, but every Easter the German bakery near me makes these…well, I’m not quite sure how to classify them. (Oh, this post is off to a great start!) They look like they could be cookies – they’re sized to be held in one’s hand and not so complicated that a fork is required – but they’re thick and puffy and in cross-section almost look like a small, not-very-moist, sturdy cake. And one of the staff members once commented on them using a yeasted dough…does that make these bread? The bakery itself coyly calls them “Bunny Faces”, and they usually get consumed so quickly that no one’s taking the time to reverse-engineer them to put a label on them.
Some careful googling took me down a rabbit hole (ha!) to this recipe. Sure, the ones in the picture had clearly used a different bunny-shaped cookie cutter, but these were them! Finally, I could make these, and…uh, what’s quark? I had never heard of it (much less seen it in a grocery store), but every person I spoke to who was of German or quasi-German descent knew immediately what I was talking about and pronounced it differently than I had been. (Because I know you’re curious: I had been saying the last part of the word like “orc”, but it’s really like “arc”, or “ark”, depending on whether you’re doing geometry or building a boat of epic proportions.)
That all changed this year, when a chance detour down the dairy aisle yielded this:
“Quark makes you strong!”
I twisted my Baking Buddy’s rubber arm to help me with these. We took our task very seriously and even broke out his kitchen scale to follow the recipe as accurately as possible. Yes, you can search online to discover that 150 g of sugar is approximately 3/4 of a cup, but that’s not a very precise approach.
Even after mixing the wet ingredients together, the batter looked like no other cookie dough I’ve seen.
Once the flour and baking powder have been added, it needs to rest for half an hour or so before kneading it briefly and rolling it out. It might not be a yeasted dough, but it sure behaves like one.
It’s already puffy before being baked! I didn’t have a bunny cutter, so we started out making little cats before deciding circles were easier.
I was a little skeptical about brushing them with melted butter before baking, but they didn’t appear greasy in the slightest after coming out of the oven.
The bottoms got a beautiful golden colour, though!
We opted to skip the step of brushing them with more melted butter before turning them into the sugar, but still got plenty to stick because they were still hot when we did this.
Look at that inside! Is it a cake? Is it a cookie? Who cares – it’s tasty as all get-out!
They don’t have as much colour on the tops as the bakery version does, and we think if we make them again we might try an egg wash to combat that. The prepackaged vanilla sugar we used didn’t seem to have a lot of kick, either, so this may require homemade vanilla sugar.
All in all, though, I’m pretty happy with how they came out for a first attempt. It’s nice to have an at-home version for when they’re out of season at the bakery.
The Witty Child 