Thank you everyone who joined our Christmas Mystery class.

Today was the first class of the 2010 holiday adventure;  I had a great time and hope you did too!

This year, our canvas was by Beth Gantz Designs.  It’s a simple design but very cute — The word Noel or Jingle on a striped background.  This is going to be a great canvas to get us in the mood for the holidays.  Not too hard, painted on 13ct and only a few colors.

We started with the background.  I love the stripes but wanted to play with them and not do the obvious, one stitch in the dark stripes and a different stitch in the light stripes.

To change things up we started with an all-over blackwork pattern changing the colors as the stripes changed.  Other than the typical issues of compensation that was a pretty straightforward task.

I do have a hint courtesy of my mom for compensating the stitch across the letters.  She continues the pattern on top of the letters in a different color of thread.  Then when everything is stitched and she knows everything lines up, out come the wrong colored stitches!  Pretty neat trick.  Thanks mom.

Once the blackwork is complete it was time to embellish the pattern with metallics.  This time rather than changing the color we changed the embellishment stitches.  How cool is that?

I’m off to start stitching the next lesson.  Now the fun can really begin!