Santas for Sunday

December??? How did it get to be December already? So far, the only Christmas decorations I've put out are the sorry looking wreaths on my front door. I need to redo them this week. However I did want to bring a little holiday spirit to my blog so for this month I will be showing some needlework from long long ago-- my needlepoint period of 20 years ago. I stitched these up for a needlepoint shop I taught at back in the late 80's. I did about a dozen of these little guys, sort of in the style of the Prairie Schooler Santas,



I think the one on the left is St. Nicholas and the one of the right is a bit of an old fashioned Santa. Each of these Santas stands about 6" high and is about 2" around at the base. A professional seamstress did the cording and the finishing and her
work is beautiful. I chose different decorative stitches and fibers for each one along with a different darning stitch pattern for the background of each Santa. The background stitches are done in ecru perle cotton.



All the sparkly shiny fibers are hard to photograph along with the fact that these are curved figures that stand. I took a couple of close up shots that let you see the stitches more clearly.



I used a ton of different fibers - wools, DMC, perle cotton, metallic braid and fibers that I can't remember what they are called.



These were stitched on 18 count needlepoint canvas. Oh I just remember what the shiny stuff was called - Marlitt. I still have a huge box of these fibers in my storage room.



I also used seed beads and the fur is wool that was stitched in loops and then I cut and shaped it. My oldest son refers to these guys as my Liberace Santas and he has a point. At the time the shop wanted me to use as many different fibers as I could and boy did I. I put together graphs with the stitches and fibers and taught it as a class. Needlepoint has gotten outrageously expensive these days. I looked at prices of hand painted canvas and was stunned. Some are going for hundreds of dollars. Along with teaching the classes I use to paint canvas for the shop too, and I never got a lot of money for it. I would paint names on stockings for stitchers - graphing it out so it was perfectly centered and picking alphabets that were in the same style as the stocking. I got paid about 50 cents a letter - oh those were the days.

Well I hope to get some Christmas decorations out this week, but first I need to put away the Fall stuff. I could use somee minions to do the heavy lifting - LOL!

Have a great week-
carol fun