More Crossing than Quilting at Quilt Crossing

I've finished my eighth Saltbox house for my Calendar series:

This one is called "Winter Saltbox" and is another design by Melisa Vandergriff at Pinker n Punkin Quilting and Stitching.  I stitched the pattern as designed in the called for colors with the exception of the "January" that I added to the bottom.  Only four more months to go.

In the meantime, I began thinking about what my next project would be and I came across this adorable Nutcracker pattern by Vitaliya Mishchuk on Etsy:

I just adore nutcrackers at Christmas time, and I think this looks like a fun one to stitch. It will finish at about 8 X 12", and I hope to have it done by Christmas of this year.  

 As I have said in the past, I haven't had much luck finding Aida fabric locally that isn't either white or off white.    I finally located a needlework shop about an hour's drive from me so I made a field trip.  The shop owner helped me find a nice shade of what she called "sage green" to use as my background.

It's surprising to me how much orange is used for a Christmas project.  Here is the "floss toss" for the first nutcracker on the left:

And here is what I have completed stitching so far.

 

I plan to work on one nutcracker at a time, in between finishing my last 4 saltbox houses.  It seems that after a long break, I have re-entered my "Cross Stitch Era".  I was going through an old sewing box and found a few floss bobbins from back-in-the-day.  They used to be a lot bigger than the ones I use now:

Linking up to Slow Sunday Stitching at Kathy's Quilts

Still stitching

The itch to stitch has certainly been a thing over here at my house.  Since my last post, I have finished three more months of little houses for my cross stitch calendar.   All the patterns are designed by Melisa Vandergriff on her blog,   Pinker n Punkin' Quilting and Stitching. 

The first was my September block:

The pattern for this house was "the Ole' Crow Saltbox".  ""Where are the crows? you might ask.  Well, I'm not a big fan of the noisy black birds so I chose to edit them out and replace them with a few swirling leaves.  The Aida cloth I used for the background on this one was a slightly mottled beige color which I have also seen called "Fiddler's Cloth".

I have been trying to find some non-white Aida cloth to buy locally, but have not been successful. I even ordered some fabric online called "Old Beige" that looked about right, but when it arrived it was a fairly whitish cream color.   I finally decided to try to tea dye the white Aida that I had, and I was happy with the results:

You can see the before and after in the picture above.  Now I could tackle those wintry months using a background that would contrast with the snow.  I decided to do December's block first:

This one is called "Christmas Eve Saltbox" and was fun to stitch, although it was kind of funny to be working on a Christmas theme over the Easter weekend.  I'm so pleased with how the white snowflakes and snowman showed up against the tea-dyed background.  The interior windows are all dark because it's bedtime, but I made the top most window alight with gold to represent someone waiting up, hoping to catch a glimpse of Santa.

My third finish started with the pattern called "Autumn's Saltbox".

I chose it for the colored leaves, and the black cat.  I liked the pattern as it was, but I also liked many of the Autumn motifs that Melisa had designed for her "Autumn Stamp" sampler, so I made some changes to the left side to include the scarecrow and the basket of pumpkins.  I think it's amusing that two little crows are having a little chat right at the base of the "scary" old scarecrow, so I had to include them in this one.

I sure hope Melisa doesn't mind that I've let my imagination take over on her delightful designs.  I'm not sure which month I'll do next, but it will get started this weekend.

Linking up to Slow Sunday Stitching at Kathy's Quilts