Christmas stitching

With lots of stitching over the past few weeks I've managed to complete the main scene on my Christmas Village embroidery.  There's still another row of fancy lacy stitching to add at the bottom, but I won't do that until closer to the end in case it catches on something.  There's also back stitching and beads to come yet, but I always do them at the end too. 

Here's the full design.  There's a lot more stitching in this scene than I realised.

So, completing that section opened up thoughts of starting something else!  Terrible, I know. 

A few months ago I showed you the Gingerbread Retreat cottage.

But I always feel guilty about leaving projects half done, so I've decided to revive my Gingerbread Needlework Shop. 

This has lain languishing because I dreaded all the fancy finishing that would be required on the inside of the removable roof.  I did make a removable roof for my very first Gingerbread House, but I don't want to do it again.

So, I've had a bright idea, and I'm going to adapt the Needlework Shop pattern slightly so I can sew my roof down and not have to finish the inside of the shop and roof.  That decision has provided great momentum, and I've now made two sides of the roof.

Stitching on blue linen is quite difficult, but there's not a huge amount of stitching required on the roof.  It's worth it because the white looks so good against the blue. 

So I'm off and enjoying my needlework again.  It's very cold here at the moment, and stitching snow seems appropriate on these cold winter nights in New Zealand.

Finally - there's a problem with Blogger at the moment that means comments left on blogs are not being sent to the blogger.  I do still read all the comments, but it's difficult to reply at the moment.  Hopefully they will fix it soon.