I am currently stitching the Gingerbread Christmas tree by Thea Dueck of Victoria Sampler from her chart pack booklet. I’ve completed side one, and now I have been stitching the other sides of this lovely cross stitch design. The chart pack is available from here. It stands about nine inches high when finished.
The original chart pack instructions show you how to finish it as an opening etui, but I’ve decided that I want it finished NOW! So, I’m going to stitch up all four sides so that it is a closed shape instead, as I’ve seen it done like that on Pinterest, and it looks good. I’ve just got no patience….!
I’m finding it a lot easier to stitch all the white cross stitch for these panels first (whereas, on the first panel, I stitched the green, and then the white), as the white shows up better, so I can stitch it faster. Then I fill in with the two green shades.
The snowman panel has a lot of snow in white on it, obviously! So it was easier to place all the white on that part too, and then stitch the coloured buildings and details. That bargello wave still does my head in with the counting though!
I realised, halfway through doing this side, that I won’t have enough of the main green colour to do all four sides (as I’m using threads from my stash rather than the materials pack that can be bought), so I matched as closely as I could from my stash (Anchor 267). The lesson from this is to buy Thea’s materials packs! They seem expensive at first, but they’ve got lots of special threads in, and all the beads, and if you had to start from scratch it would cost a lot more. I should take my own advice, really….
Here’s the first and second panels:
The floral vine along the base of each side is a nice change of pace, after doing all that cross stitching. The panel up to this part is almost all cross stitch, with a little back stitch and some queen stitch for the tree on the left.
As I’d used the wrong green for this part on the first panel, I had to remember to keep on doing it ‘wrong’ for these other panels too!
I repeated the red flowers the same as for the first side…which is wrong too! They should be a different stitch. I must be going doolally, and not reading the chart correctly 🙂 Still, they look nice – you make a base of five spokes, coming out from one central point, and then start at the centre with another thread, and work a kind of stem stitch out along the spokes until they are full.
The next panel was easy to do, as I’m getting in the swing of it now:
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