Tag: Christmas stitching

All I Want To Do Is Stitch
Christmas · Crochet · cross stitch · WIPGO 2026 · yarn

All I Want To Do Is Stitch

My Time Stitching1 Comment

Hello my Blogging Friends! It has been way longer than I wanted since my last post. We were doing some home renovations and updates for the last few months. Unpacking boxes and getting things back to normal has been taking longer than I thought. I have a few more weeks before my Mother in Law comes to visit, so I am getting down to the wire with final appointments and making sure that everything I want unpacked, is unpacked and put away. But I am still stitching. At the end of the day, I always look forward to picking up my needle and thread and putting stitches into fabric. I also look forward to picking up my knitting needles or a crochet hook, too. So, what have I been up to?

Let’s start with my first August WIPGO draw; #19. On my board that was O’er The Fields We Go by JBW Design

Just a reminder, I am doing all Christmas and winter projects for my WIPGO 2026. And so far I have been keeping up. Since my Christmas decorations have been red and white the last couple of years, I had to add this one to my line up. Right now I am a little over 50% done and here is how it looks now.

I am stitching this one on 16ct Aida Christmas Red and I am using 2 strands of DMC B5200 along with one strand of Kreinik 032 Blending Filament, for a bit of sparkle 😉 I love how this one is looking so far and I think I will be making it into a pillow, similar to the sample on the chart cover. I do think I am going to have a bit of a time getting all of those wrinkles out of the Aida though.

My current knitting project is the Lil Something Shawl from Laura Dobratz. I started this one on July 5.

The yarn came in a Mermaid Box from Twice Sheared Sheep. It is Staple Sock from The Sheepyshire and the color is called Be A Mermaid. I love it! I thought this yarn would be perfect for this one skein shawl pattern which is available on Ravelry.

Those cute little jellyfish needle point protectors and the mermaid tail progress marker were also in the mermaid box. The cute mermaid gnomes knitting bag is from Three By The Sea Designs on Etsy. I really have an ocean theme going on here, don’t I?

I love stitching on this shawl in the morning while having my coffee. It is such a relaxing knit. Mostly garter stitch with some slipped stitches on the edges for the Icord edging and some yarn over increases. It makes a great travel project, too. The yarn is so soft and squishy and nice to work with.

I have one more project to share with you today. Back in May 2025 I started a crochet blanket called 2%. I am not sure I ever posted about it here on the blog.

I am not a great crocheter, but I saw this blanket on someone’s flosstube and really wanted to make it. So I searched out where to find the Bonus Bundles of Mandala yar by Lion Brand. The 2% blanket calls for 2 giant skeins. I found them at Walmart and chose the color Meowth.

My stitch count per row is not always what it should be, so I fudge a little. I think it is looking pretty good. After this photo was taken, I had put the project away for about a year. I picked it up again this past May and made good progress on it.

I decided to keep working on it until I finished at the end of June.

I have not blocked it yet, but I think it came out really nice. It is not perfect, but I love it. I really enjoyed crocheting all of the different stitches and am quite proud that all of my holes that form a giant X all line up. Did I have to fudge some of them? Yes, but they do line up.

I do love this blanket and can’t wait to cuddle up on the couch with it this fall and winter. Of course with all of the renovations we have done, the colors really don’t match our living room anymore. So I went to Walmart to see if I could find that same yarn in different colors. It was slim picking! Not sure if they are not carrying it anymore or what. I did find this yarn at a local yarn shop that has the perfect colroing-grays and blacks.

Jewelspun is an Aran weight yarn, so thicker than the Lion Brand Mandala yarn. I will see how far I get with 2 skeins of it. I haven’t started it yet, but I know that I will enjoy it as much as I did the first one.

So, that is what I have been up to lately. I think in my next post (which hopefully will not be that long into the future) I will do an update with all of my WIPGO projects. I am happy with all of the holiday projects I have completed this year. Can you believe that the 30+ year old Nativity project has not been called yet? It is on my WIPGO board 4 times and has not been called once. I am pretty sure that one is not going to get completed this year. And I only finally got a BINGO in July! Actually a double BINGO, so that means 2 new starts!!! One has already been started and another is maybe soon to be started 😉 More on those in another post.

So leave me a comment and tell me what you have been working on the last few months. Did you work on any holiday projects for Christmas in July? You know that Christmas has been all year for me this year. I would love to hear about your holiday projects and what you have been up to.

Happy Stitching!

ginny

Birthday Start and It’s a Big One!
Christmas · Country Cottage Needleworks · cross stitch · Frogs · WIPGO 2026

Birthday Start and It’s a Big One!

My Time Stitching6 Comments

Hello my blogging friends! I hope that you are well and that your New Year is going smoothly and that your weather is good. It has snowed every day in the month of January and February seems to be doing a repeat. It is snowing today but the temps are a little better than they have been. I am sick of winter and looking forward to Spring, which seems so far away. But, enough of all of that. On to the stitching.

I had a birthday about 10 days ago and celebrated by starting a new project. It’s a big project, not a big birthday, LOL. A project that has been in my stash for just about 11 years! In April of 2015, I received this wonderful package in the mail that contained my long-awaited Chatelaine kit.

Everything I needed to start the Fairy Flower Garden Chatelaine except for the DMC threads. Soon after receiving it, I had a surgery, recovery and hubby and I were always on the go. When I finally sat down to get this project started, the pattern was so tiny that it could not be read. And I think I was a bit intimidated, too. I had purchased the PDF, but the thought of enlarging sections and printing them out just wasn’t what I was ready for. So, it just sat in a project bag all of these years. Near the end of 2025 I decided that I would be starting this project on my Birthday in January 2026. Hubby gave me an iPad last year, that I found out I could use for cross stitch. A few months ago, I purchased an App called Knit Companion because I heard that it would also work with cross stitch patterns. Hubby loaded my pattern in and pieced the pages together for me. I would have never been able to do it, so I am so thankful for my personal IT guy 😉 For my Birthday, he gave me a Pen for my iPad so I could mark off my cross stitch easier than using my finger. So on my Birthday I hunkered down for some serious Chatelaine stitching.

This was going to take some getting used to for sure. But it went well. Slowly, with having to mark off on the iPad, but I really enjoyed stitching on this project. It didn’t hurt that all of the stitching I did, was with silk threads and few metallics. I worked on it for about a week and here is where I am with it.

I look forward to getting back to this project in between my WIPGO projects this year. I am stitching on 28ct Lugana in Antique White and I didn’t mind stitching on 28ct at all.

Speaking of WIPGO, I finished both of my January WIPGO numbers! Woo Hoo! The first number was 2 and that was my Big City Christmas which I had already been working on. So I worked on it until the 10th and got it to this point.

Just one more shop left to do on this one. But I switched to my next WIPGO call, #7, which is Mistletoad from Lizzie Kate.

This was a fun, quick project that I enjoyed working on. This pattern has been in my stash for many years along with the frame. Hopefully I will sit down one day soon and try to frame it myself.

First finish of 2026. And the first square on my WIPGO board taken care of.

I picked up Big City Christmas again and worked on it until I finished it.

It looks so good! I love it! I had already purchased a special frame for this and was so excited to pull it out and get an idea of how it would look.

Oh I was so disappointed that this frame didn’t fit the project. I was told when I ordered it that it would be for 16ct aida. The fabric was even cut at this shop. So I messaged them and they said it was for 14ct aida…Even if it was for 14ct aida, I should have the same amount of margin all the way around the design. Not all of the extra space on each end. So…the frame is being reordered and it will take 4-6 weeks. I gave the measurements of my finished piece, so hopefully it will be right when it does come in. It is a beautiful hand painted frame and it was the reason I decided to purchase the patterns. At least I still have lots of time before the holidays come around again. Anyway, the pattern is Big City Christmas from Country Cottage Needleworks (7 patterns) and it is stitched on 16ct Aida Swamp Monster from Laura’s Fabrics.

So that is what I have been up to. Lots of stitching, learning how to use my iPad with my cross stitch and now another year older. The next WIPGO numbers have been called and one is for a Nora Corbett letter. My fabric order came in for those last week and it is not going to work. More about that next time. Let me know what you have been up to.

Happy Stitching,

ginny

Playing WIPGO In 2026
Christmas · WIPGO 2026

Playing WIPGO In 2026

My Time Stitching6 Comments

Hello blogging friends! Two posts in one week, I know! I am off to a great start. So, as you can tell from my title, I will be participating in WIPGO for the first time in 2026. If you don’t know what WIPGO is, it is basically a bingo where you put items on a board that you want to accomplish in the year. You can use it for Cross Stitch, knitting, quilting, places you want to go, things you want to do. The possibilities are endless. I will be using mine for Cross Stitch. If you want to find out in more detail what it is all about, you can visit Jessie Marie Does Stuff on Facebook, Instagram or her You Tube channel. She is the one that created it and will be calling the numbers each month.

I will be using a board created by Nichol Spohr. During her Vlogmas videos this month, she talked about doing a Christmas WIPGO. I thought that was an awesome idea since I have been stitching on 2 Christmas projects for this last year and currently. And every time I saw a Christmas pattern in my stash or that someone else was doing, I would say “Oh I should do that for Christmas!” and knowing there was no way I was going to get any of them finished for this year. But I could for next year! And if you have been following me, you know that the 30+ year old Nativity project is still not finished. So I downloaded the board from Nichol’s You Tube channel and proceeded to pick and choose which projects I wanted to do this year. You can download it from her channel or her website shown on the photo of the board above. I had no problem filling up the 25 spaces, adding the Nativity several times and also adding a project to my free space.

Jesse Marie Does Stuff chooses the numbers every month on the 25th of the month and on December 25th she chose the numbers 2 and 7 for January 2026. The number 2 was perfect! Big City Christmas!! Which is what I am currently working on. But I had an issue with the number 7. It is the Letter Q from Nora Corbett. I plan on stitching the letters N Q E L this year, making the Q into an O to spell Noel. I only just ordered fabric for these letters about a week or so ago, so I will not be able to work on that one. So I made some adjustments to my board.

I swapped number 7 with number 4. Hopefully by the time any of the numbers with Nora letters are called in the future, I will have my fabric. So, for now, this is my final WIPGO board for 2026 . Only 2 projects are WIP’s. All of the others will be new starts and hopefully most will be finished before Christmas next year. Since I am a stitch whatever I want, whenever I want kind of gal, and I don’t count stitches, EVER, I did not put any restrictions on my projects. I just need to work on them in the month that they are called. That can be for a day, 3 days, a week, or until I am ready to do something else. Jessie Marie says you can make WIPGO your own and that is what I am doing. Look forward to seeing lots of Christmas stitching this year, as well as other WIP’s and knitting and crocheting and whatever else I get up to in 2026. I am really looking forward to trying WIPGO out and seeing how much Christmas stitching I can get done.

What are your plans for 2026? I’d love to hear about them.

Happy Stitching!

ginny