A Christmas tea towel

I made this for my friend Fuchsia for the Christmas in July swap.  It's from the Twelve Days of Christmas pattern set from Crabapple Hill Studio.  Since I was making only one tea towel, I opted to omit the number from the pattern (the numbers one through twelve are part of the designs).  I had neglected to take photos, so Fuchsia kindly took some for me.

Here is a closer look at the stitching.  The design was easy and fun to stitch. 

Directions for the scalloped fabric border are also included with the pattern.  This is a bonus, as far as I'm concerned, as I've been wanting to learn to make this type of border for a tea towel for a long time.  You can't really see it, but I imagine you can if you click on the picture at top -- the edging fabric has a muted design of evergreen sprigs, so it's perfect with the spriggy garland behind the Christmas cookies in the embroidered design.


Earlier in the year, I used the vintage camper design from Sublime Stitching's Camp Out! set to make more of these scallop-edged towels.  I thought you might like to see those too, so here they are in two different color combinations:

Blue camper with green edging

Red camper with aqua edging

What a fun pattern this is.  Check out Crabapple Hill Studio if you like to embroider.  You won't be disappointed!

A "Christmas caravan" ornament

Our Canadian and British friends call this a "caravan".  Here in the states we are more likely to call it a camper  or camping trailer -- in this case, a cute little vintage one.  I found the camper design in the Sublime Stitching collection called "Camp Out".  I've used this design for dish towels and they came out very cute, but I decided to also try making it into a Christmas ornament, and this is the result.

It was easy to decide what colors to use to make it Christmasy, but a bit more difficult to figure out how to make this into an ornament.  I made the design smaller by first scanning it, then shrinking it to make it a better size for an ornament.  It's still quite large and probably would look better hung in a window or from a peg rack or something, rather than on the Christmas tree.  Then I used a homespun in a Christmas plaid, along with green felt, to make the ornament itself.  It has a wire hanger trimmed with buttons, and as you can see I put it all together with blanket stitching on each layer.  I found the design in Gooseberry Patch Christmas, Book 3.  It was used for cross-stitch ornaments there, but I found the design worked admirably for embroidered ornaments, too.  What a fun project this was!