Gingerbread Church by Victoria Sampler 1: Getting started

I’ve decided to start on the third of the Gingerbread Village cross stitch buildings, designed by Thea Dueck of Victoria Sampler in Canada. These are cute little buildings, made from the chart booklets that Thea sells – last year, I had the two I’d completed taking pride of place under my Christmas tree. This year, I want to get a third one completed in time for Christmas, to make the display look more balanced, and to give it some height. So, I’ve decided to do the Gingerbread Church, which stands about 10 inches high when finished, and has a striking black roof, so it will look quite different from the other two buildings. Eventually, I’m hoping to do virtually all of the buildings in the series, but I think I’ll need to stitch quicker, as Thea is bringing out new ones faster than I am stitching them!

Here are the two that I had finished by last Christmas – the Gingerbread Stitching House, and the Gingerbread Candy Cane cottage:

Each panel is stitched separately, and then put together by lacing each panel over card, and lacing up through the backstitched edges. This is the far end wall of the Gingerbread church, showing just the main sections of the design, and not the outline of the walls:

The bit I like about these buildings is that they all have lots of beads and buttons attached to them after the cross stitch is done, which really finishes them off nicely. The packs of threads and beads are available to buy separately from the chart booklets. I think the accessory packs are quite expensive, but if you need to buy almost any of the items in them from scratch, it’s going to work out quite pricey anyway, especially when you add on shipping. I did buy the accessory pack for this project, along with the chart booklet, from Sew and So in the UK. The speciality beads really make a difference:

This is the ‘steeple end’, with the space where the steeple will be attached left blank, except for the backstitching, which will be used to lace each section together with Perle thread later:

After stitching both of the end walls, I thought I’d ‘save time’ by stitching the two base pieces (just the outlines), so that when it came to assembly, these bits would already be finished. However, I found after bothering to stitch these to the dimensions given in the booklet, that the larger base piece was drawn wrongly, and was actually one stitch out on the long side….so I had to unpick it and stitch it again, so it saved me no time at all. Hopefully, later editions of the booklet will have that corrected (I bought my booklet as soon as this design was for sale, about three years ago, now).

Still, that’s four pieces finished in a week, which can’t be bad!

 

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