Today has been our Christmas meeting at Seata. We had a different format this year, a Sewing Bee type challenge. We knew in advance that we could use the word “Tree”, “Snow”, “Star” or “Gift” to produce a piece of work that didn’t have to be finished, and that would be judged at the end of the day by Alex, our Chair. We could work out our design, even draw it up, but no stitching was to be done in advance.

Predictably I couldn’t make up my mind what to do but, seeing a picture of an embroidered tree on a Christmas card yesterday, it gave me a starting point.

What to use as a background? Having a rummage last night I found a lovely piece of dark green velvet. Perfect. I also wanted some lighter green felt to cut out a triangle to stitch on. No joy, it seems to have disappeared into the black hole with calico and bond-a-web. A beige piece was the best I could find, even after a better look this morning. So the only prepping I had done was to cut a piece of velvet and put masking tape round the edges. A zigzag on the sewing machine would have been better, but no time for that. Then to make a pattern from a folded piece of A4 paper, cutting it from the top fold to the bottom corner, and then cutting a couple of inches off the bottom, and finally cutting a triangle of felt.

I used a green perlé to start feather stitching to a faint blue line of water soluble pen. So far I have only stitched the felt, I’ll attach it to the velvet later. It’s all random, to try and give a more realistic tree. It’s certainly not precise and mirror-imaged.

I added another layer of branches in a variegated knitted thread, and this is how far I’d got by lunch-time.

We had a very nice shared planned “Potluck” lunch. Several of the members find it far too stressful to be potluck, and don’t trust that it will work. I’ve been in several groups over the years where it has always worked beautifully, with a good balance of savoury and sweet. To me, it’s more of a challenge to think what I want to cook / bring so far in advance!

We had all voted during the morning with the usual 5 beads for the Chairs Christmas Challenge, “The Twelve Days of Christmas ” made as a card. The ones who wanted to take part had a lucky dip at a previous meeting. I got four calling (coley – black) birds. I started it several weeks ago, but only finished stitching it this week, attaching it to the card and finishing it off last night!

As my starting-point, I used a photo I took from a friend’s window last December of a blackbird eating cotoneaster berries. After several sketches, looking at books and online to get the legs right, I used a lightbox to prick through the outline on to thin card.

Then I stitched in black thread for the body, some gold for the beak, brown for the legs, a gold jump-ring to outline the eye, and a tiny black sequin for the beady eye.

For the inside, Christmas wishes in the shape of a Christmas tree alternating the letters in red and green……

…….. and the words of part of the chorus on the flap of the card.

After lunch we went back to stitching. I wasn’t sure whether to start decorating with beads and sequins, etc. at this stage, as time was running out rapidly…..

……. or to carry on adding more layers of feather stitch, which I decided was the better option. There was no chance of finishing, and it would be better to finish the fly stitch first. Not the first Christmas project that has taken a while – sometimes years – to finish!