A Few New Things (plus an update on an old thing)

I'm always losing my needles as I work on my different little projects and my family is always finding them in not very fun ways, so I made this little book out of felt to hold them for me. :) I liked the book so much I've decided to make another one and send this one on to a friend for Christmas.

I went to a little craft day with some friends and made these two framed pictures. Everyone else made calendars, but I decided to turn mine into a weekly menu (which is now hanging in my kitchen) and a conducting help for Young Women's on Sundays. You put the permanent information under the glass and write on top of it with dry erase markers. Super cute and easy. It's always fun to mess around with pretty papers and actually finish something in less than 20 minutes.

I have a niece staying with me while her momma is sick and she wanted me to take pictures of the fun snow flakes we made and put it on my blog here. I learned how to make them a few years ago and every year have made a few more and laminated them to keep well and add to the collection. We have about 40 of them now. Someday I'd love to have a couple hundred, but that's a lot of laminating and I can't get myself to use more than 10 sheets on snowflakes every year. :) They are really fun to make and super addicting. We have enough of a collection to hang from our family room ceiling. :) For instructions on how you can look back at my blog where I wrote about it here.

And last of all: My yearly update on my cross stitch. :) Remember this sucker? This is such a monster. I wrote about it here. It may not look like a lot of progress, but when you have to make 625 per inch and the entire project is 18" by 22" it's takes a long time to make a noticeable difference. I'm still working on it in the evenings for an hour or two every night while catching up on shows with Seth or him reading to me. I'm guessing it will be done by next Christmas. I'm itching to start a new cross stitch pattern. I'm getting pretty sick of oranges, browns, yellows, and reds. I have 8 more Scott Gustafson patterns waiting for me to make. I'll probably go blind before I finish them all when they take me 3 years each. I know, I'm crazy. It gives me something to do. I just don't like sitting still. It feels unproductive. Probably I have adhd or something. haha

Here is what it looks like now:

Here is what it looked like last Jan:

(seeing them side by side

helps to see progress)

Here's a close up.

And here is an even more close up. :) My cell phone camera doesn't take the best pictures, but you get the idea of how tiny the little stitches are.