Christmas on the 25th - June

Here we are, Christmas on the 25th again! The main reason that I decided to do a "Christmas on the 25th" series all year is that I have so many Christmas projects that I want to do, and when I wait until December...I never get a chance to do them!

Today I want to share a cross stitch project that I started last week. I found a FREE chart on Fat Quarter Shop called Home for the Holidays Christmas Square Dance Border by Heart in Hand. (Lower right photo in the collection above.) I liked the idea of the chart, to have the holiday words with frames to stitch some Christmas items, however I did not want to buy the called for charts to go into the squares. I already have a lot of charts that I want to stitch. In short, I wanted to use the border chart idea for a project of my own.

I ended up doing a lot of calculations of the projects I wanted to stitch, and how to fit them into square "frames". I will need to modify some of the charts, but that is pretty easy for me. It's how I roll. I ended up picking the projects shown in the top photo. There are actually four charts, because I want to combine a few things and...well do my thing!

I chose a color palette that I can use across all the charts. I use DMC floss, so I just went into my floss boxes and chose some colors that I thought would work.

Once I had all the colors picked out, I placed them down on a few fabric choices before deciding on this 16 count Aida called Rustico, which is a soft oatmeal color, perfect for vintage Christmas! The piece will be about 16" x 8" when finished.

Note: There are not five black bobbins in the photo above! The light was not very good and the darker greens and browns presented as VERY dark.

After more calculating and counting I decided how to best start the project. Which is really going to be interesting since I did not "re-chart" anything, I am just winging it!

I started with the lettering. I plan to add some motifs next to the lettering. Perhaps snowflakes or something, but will wait until the end to see how everything looks. 

I enlarged the square frames to 70 stitches to fit my patterns. (I hope!)

I chose two reds for some dimension. The lettering is a darker shade, and the "shelf" and the frames are a lighter, brighter shade. The small letters are a deep green that will be used in some of the trees. It might be too dark, but I will see how I feel later. If I need to pull it out and re-stitch those few stiches with a lighter, shade of green, no worries! 

Thanks for hanging out with me for a bit! I hope I have inspired  you to work on Christmas projects all year long. I plan to work on this on a few days a month to try to finish it for display this Christmas!