Holiday Pillows

I have been making holiday pillows for many years now and have a respectable collection which I will be using on my couch ... the perfect background with its deep forest green velvet. While I have given away quite a few of the Christmas pillows, I have kept nearly as many as I have given away ... quite the opposite of my tendency to give away ornaments and only keep a few.

The first pillow [right] was made by joining four Glory Bee Christmas ornament charts into a flea-market style group with feather stitching to embellish the seams. The ornaments themselves were sized up because I used a very low count aida [10, I think] leftover from teaching Girl Scouts to cross stitch. I tea-dyed two of the patches for a little added contrast and used some beads to add a little something. I stitched these from magazine charts years before I became designer-conscious or even knew who Glory Bee was. Nancy of Glory Bee has since become one of my favorite designers so I was not at all surprised to come across the old charts while browsing through one of my binders and, guess what, see her name!!! This pillow is one of my favorites because it says it all: Peace, Joy, Love, Home. The second [left] is an old Secret Needle Night piece from The Silver Needle. I don't usually do "cute", I am more of a country and primitive [with the occasional foray into whimsical] kind of person. But this one caught my fancy. The third [right again] is a funky little free chart featuring a snowman wrapped up snugly in a scarf, again not in my usual style, but the whimsy appealed to me. And this particular pillow finish seems "country" enough to make it all work for me. And somewhere in the house is a very old pillow, my very first, with a partridge in a pear tree design. I hope to find it in time to display it this Christmas, since it is really one of my favorites. This missing pillow was the very first project in which I ever used metallics or other specialty fibers ... all I knew up to that point was DMC ... but I saw the chart in a magazine and ... thus began my obsession with fiber.

I'll post pictures of a few more pillows in a day or so: the first four Annual Sue Hillis Charmed Santas are in various stages of assembly-line pillow production.