Fifth day of December

More light is needed into the dark so here's another easy, lovely and cheap idea to decorate your home. You need an empty jar made of glass and decorative electric lights. No one says the lights have to be yellow, if you prefer red -just try it out!

Fourth day of December

Winter season is so dark that it is nice to put up some extra light inside and outside. These lanterns have been made of old tins and wire. They are for outdoor use only. In the darkness none sees from which they have been made of. Only thing you see is beautiful light that shines around and forms pretty figures around the lanterns. You just need to pick up the tins which have no plastic inside covering. Remove the top lid and make the holes.

Third day of December

This is an excellent guide book to all kind of stitching. It is Stitch Dictionary by Lucinda Ganderton. More words are not needed to praise its collection. If anything else into it is needed it is the tranlations of the stitch names to several languages! Proper colour pictures and instructions are great. Even a novise will survive with this book in the jungle of stitching.

Second day of December

This cute reindeer is from Cross Stitch Favourites magazine. It is a special issue and I was not able to find the year or any date from it but I foud advert of The Stitch and Creative Crafts Shows for the autumn 2007 from it. So, it has to be published before that.

This reindeer is one of three reindeers designed by Jenny Barton and you can find the charts for each from the page 78. In the magazine the reindeers are stitched for mounting them in the same frame. I decided to stitch them on palstic canvas to get cute Christmas tree decorations. I used loose end threads instead of the ones marked with the chart. But the basic idea with the colours is the same. (I have added some metallic thread to the wrapping paper.)

In the magazine is also other series of designs that fit well together. I noticed it is a good idea to stitch one at every Christmas for yourself or to give at someone special. It is also a proper small gift to be sent away with a Christmas card. Postages are low but the gift itself is valuable because stitched with love. 

First day of December

These mittens are the ones I mentioned before. Very proper ones because knitted in three times. The yarn is Fabel superwash I used also with the furry green hat and scarf. This yarn can't be seen so well with the hat and scarf but here you see how does it look.

The problems I had with knitting was that first the mittens were too short, so I had to add more until my Fabel Superwash yarn ran out. It didn't help. They were still too short. So, I went to my yarn box and found very well matching, a bit thicker yarn, which is Novita's Nalle Colori. (Fabel Superwash has 205m / 50g and Nalle Colori has 130m / 50g.) The difference with outlook is so small that you can't notice it if you don't know about it. Nalle Colori begins at the top of the mittens right after the last white-grey stripe. At the end it was actually good I ran out of the yarn because in this way the mittens warm up the fingertips better.

These mittens are for horse riding use. They come under leather mittens with teddy lining. Riding in the frost is cool job to do. I knitted these mittens for tiny hands to give extra protection against frostbittens. It is good idea to use yarn that has different kind of shades so you don't need to change the yarn to get lively and colourful surface on your work. These are my own design but I bet anyone who can knit a bit can create something similar.