Christmas cross stitch in April

The last few days I have been doing some cross stitch again - I normally only end up doing any around Christmas and making little cards for people but I had got to the point with the rug that I’m making that I wanted a little break so I went and grabbed my cross stitch bag the other night as something small and easy that I could do while sat watching tv.

I found a little kit to make this robin so I started with that although it’s Christmassy- it felt a bit wrong with it being April but it was the easiest thing I had to keep me amused for a while.

He was easy enough to get started and ended up coming along quite quickly

 I soon realised that as with many of these kits they seem to give about twice as much thread as I actually use to make the cross stitch so I raided my cross stitch bag for some fresh Aida and made a second robin alongside this one.

Once I had done this I had another rummage and found a few kits that I had kept with only some thread and the pattern inside. I found this little gingerbread man out next and decided to sew him to add to the “Christmas in April” collection.

 As you can tell from the photo above I did most of the darker colour first around the edges and then started to fill in with the light brown to make the rest of his body. It was all going quite well until I got to very close to the end and I realised on the left arm that I wasn’t going to have enough light brown left to finish him off...

I had to improvise so this gingerbread man sat in the over for ever so slightly too long as his head has started to turn slightly - I had to do all of his head and a little bit at the top of his left arm in the slightly darker brown. Otherwise I think he’s ok. He’s a very dapper gingerbread man with the bow tie on and everything.

Once I had done these two Christmas cross stitches I decided that was enough of Christmas in April so my next challenge was to go through my sewing bag and work out what I could do next. I binned some old kits that I’ve had for years, started and never finished because I’ve simply not enjoyed them or I know that they’ve gone wrong somewhere or something. I decided that if they were no fun to do then there was no point in keeping them.

The next was to go through the kits that had already been done and work out that if there wasn’t enough thread left to make another copy of the pattern with what was included in the set then I should keep hold of the patterns in my pattern file but merge the leftover thread together in case some of it worked together to make something else at some point.

These are all the kits I pulled out the patterns from (any requests please let me know!)

And the thread has gone into my stash

I still have a number of kits left to work on which is good - I like to have some in for emergencies when I need something to do. I have got another nice one out now which I have started sorting to start today. I’ll update you shortly with that one.