Christmas cards - done! Birthday books - done! Placemats - done! Embroidered picture frame - not done!

Good morning everyone,

I'm sure there's noone out there as everyone is participating in the excellent Sew, Mama, Sew giveaway day!  Follow the link to go to one of 3 pages of lists of blogs having giveaways.  I wish I'd known as I do have something I could have given away, but now it will have to wait.  I've got through 2 lists already, just the third to go!  I love finding new blogs so it's a real treat for me, even if I don't win and I probably wont!

I finished my Christmas cards this weekend!  Remember the trees made up of buttons and gems?  I turned them into cards for the parents and my step daughter:

And everyone else will be receiving a super-simple The Snowman card.  I'm usually quite glitzy with my cards and add loads of embellishments, but I had so little time this year that I thought I'd try simple.  I'm quite pleased with them.  The metal greeting adds a special touch.  Here is a shot of some of them.

All the same but slightly different.  And here's a close up of one of them:

Continuing with some papercraft, I also made 3 birthday books as presents on Saturday, again, all the same but a bit different, depending on which alphabet stickers I had!:

Here are some shots of the inside pages (pretty rubbish shots, I'm not getting the hang of this photography lark):

I said shots, but there was only one!  I'd taken 3 pictures of the same pages... you'll have to believe me when I tell you I did do all 12 months!

I showed you some coaster I was making for my brother for Christmas a while ago, and in the last post I showed you the tea towels I'd made, well now I've finished up the placemats (I'm guessing you've realised it's all a matching set!), there's just coffee cosies to go and I'll show you them all together.  I'm quite pleased with these.

The sewing went a lot better than with the coasters - they aren't as wobbly as they look in the photo, it's because they're soft with the wadding inside.  I didn't iron them when I'd sewed as I left almost a whole side for turning to avoid having to iron and ruin the wadded feel to them.  The top left is a back view of one, it's not an odd-one-out!

Next up is the first bit of work I've done on my Craft Book Challenge in a long time.  I've been working on an embroidered picture frame from Quilt A Gift (see my Craft Book page for more information) but it's been hard going as the instructions are not great.  I had to sew the back piece twice as it never stated in the instructions what the seam allowance was, or even if there was one!  So I threw the first one and did my own measurements for this version.  I've whipstitched the felt hearts in place and embroidered the vine (I've finished the last corner since I took this photo - I was planning on blogging yesterday but brought the lead that connects my husband's phone to his computer rather than my camera lead!!) and now I've just got to sew on some little beads as flowers:

The photo goes in the middle, under the ribbons, and I have a photo frame to put it in.  It will be a picture of us at our wedding and is for my husband's grandma - the only grandparent we have left between us.  I really hope she likes it.

Here's a close up of the stitching:

What do you think?  Would you be gutted to receive a photo of someone else for Christmas??