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