Starting and Finishing

Hello everybody and I hope that the new year is treating you well. I thought I'd start my first blog post of 2020 by showing you one of my favourite Christmas presents.

My daughter made me these felt ornaments of Oliver and Amanda Pig from the much loved children's books. Written by Jean Van Leeuwen and illustrated by Ann Schweninger, you can read about the origins of the stories here. I hadn't realised that Oliver and Amanda were inspired by the author's children, David and Elizabeth.

We have two big baskets of treasured Christmas picture books that we bring out every year and 'Oliver and Amanda's Christmas' is one of our favourites.

In the five stories in this book, Oliver and Amanda make presents, help choose a Christmas tree and bake some fat biscuits. Oliver gets carried away with how many presents he thinks he needs, at one point deciding he'll need to hang up a big tablecloth rather than a stocking, but the arrival of Grandma with new hand knitted stockings calms him down. In the last story they celebrate Christmas and the little pigs play with their new toys, including a doll and a fire truck. 'Amanda rocked Patsy Ann in her arms. Oliver put out a fire under the piano.' As you do.

Here's the illustration of Amanda Pig carrying home the little nest that they find in their Christmas tree.

You can see how well my felt decoration matches the original. My daughter tells me that there will be more felt ornaments of children's book characters to come in future years so I'm going to get a mini tree to put them all on. Apparently, I'm not allowed to make requests but, if you're reading this Rose, Alpaca!

Anyway, this lovely present reminded me of my plan, many years ago when the children were small, to embroider pictures of characters from children's books. I started off bravely with this patchwork Elmer. I drew the elephant and then worked each square in different needlepoint stitches. The whole thing is quite small - my eyesight was a lot better then.

I then rashly decided to fill in the background with tiny green stitches ... which is why it never got finished. It took me quite a while to find it in the bottom of a basket of half-finished projects and I'm pleased to see that there's not actually that much more to do. Now that I've got my wonderful magnifying craft light, I should be able to finish the background and then outline Elmer with a bit of backstitch.

Maybe I'll start on another one once Elmer's finished. I though a blackwork picture of Rosie from Rosie's Walk would be good (although using the colours of the illustrations) so that's next on my list.

I have an awful lot of things that I started and never got round to finishing so, this year, I'm going to try to get some of them done. I have quite a few cross stitch pictures ready to frame, for example. I've even bought some of the frames so there's no excuse for not doing them.

This little 3D gingerbread house was a project in an issue of 'World of Cross Stitching' from 2016.

I finished the stitching that year but, two Christmases later, I still hadn't put the house together. So, earlier this month, I spent an evening doing that and, apart from attaching the roof which was tricky, it went together quite easily. Doesn't it look nice?

I finished it just in time to put it away with the rest of the Christmas decorations but I shall enjoy getting it out next year.

Here's another project that's been waiting to be finished for a while, this time a needlepoint decoration.

This is one of a series of six decorations that I bought together as a kit.

I'd only managed to actually finish one, the Christmas tree, but now I have two to hang on my tree.

I also managed to finish my weaving advent calendar that I showed you last month. I wove 24 squares and sewed them together to make a small blanket. Determined to use up all the odd lengths of yarn, I crocheted a random border all round it (Oh, all those ends to sew in) and then gave it a good blocking. This transformed it from an uneven hotchpotch into something quite respectable.

Its the right size to go on my coffee table but, at the moment, its draped over the back of one of my chairs like a modern day antimacasser.

I still have some more squares to weave for the border of my temperature blanket from last year too. They're not very exciting so I keep putting them off but it will be nice to finish it. Im looking forward to showing it to you all once it's done.

I've started a UFO (unfinished objects) group on ravelry for mutual support and encouragement. It turns out that I'm not the only one who doesn't finish stuff. If you'd like to deal with some of your lurking UFOs this year - any craft welcome - then do come and join us. Unfinished Objects 2020