Hmmm….something beginning with S? Can you find it?

Sorry about the photo taken in poor electric light. Well, can you see him? You can now 🙂 Here he is sitting right at the top of my Christmas tree. It’s Santa and he flew all the way on his sleigh from Germany to be with us.

Santa was made by Annett, my blogging friend. She’s very clever and  kind. Annett’s lovely blog can be found here. She has clearly explained how she made twin Santas with great photos too. As you can see, Santa is feeling very at home here. He watches us watching TV and eating too much LOL. Thank you for the lovely surprise Annett. We’ll put him away in the Christmas decorations box when the holidays are over, ready for all of our future Christmasses 🙂

Santa’s little elves were also busy buying and making me crafty presents too. This bundle of gorgeousness arrived from my friend Claire who lives in France. Claire knows that I love hedgehogs, including the real one who lives in my garden. He doesn’t come out in the winter because he has a long sleep so this cross stitch will be a good substitute for him around here 🙂

Claire also sent some lovely extra handmade tree decorations. I’ve got lots of Claire’s mini makes on my tree 🙂 There’s a new bookmark which is going to be used in the book below and also one of Claire’s latest triumphs, an elongated purse. She has made lots of coin purses for gifts this year but I don’t use a purse so she made me a deeper version. I’m going to store all of my spare bobbins inside. The fabrics both inside and out are gorgeous. There was also another bookmark for my OH which he won’t give up for the photo because he’s using it! We both say “Thank you!”.

My dear friend Lin sent me this loom. It’s a rather ingenious contraption. I’ll let you see what it makes when I’ve used it 🙂 In the meantime you can play at guessing what it does. Lin was very concerned that her gift was bashed to bits inside the parcel because it had arrived at her address in a sorry state. However, the contents were perfect so she needn’t have worried. I’m looking forward to trying it out very soon. The good thing was that my OH intercepted the post when the parcel arrived. He won’t allow me to even touch parcels addressed to me if he suspects they are gifts. I only want to have a squish so I can think about what MIGHT be inside LOL. Anyway, he squirrelled this one away so I couldn’t get my hands on it. Thank you Lin. I know I’ll have a lot of fun with this 🙂

My daughter chose to buy something from my wish list. It was still a surprise because my wish list is always a work in progress. She knows how to keep me quiet 😉 Much appreciated.

I’m already enjoying making the Loyal Union Sampler from another book that my sister bought me. You can follow my progress here, on my other blog (which is soon to be updated). The Farmer’s Wife sampler will follow LUS. Let me know what you think if you’ve already made this quilt.

Last but not least, my OH gave me another cross stitch chart by Ink Circles. I love this series. It should keep me out of trouble for a while. I have two cross stitch projects on the go at the moment which already breaks my own rule of only ever having one project of each craft discipline in progress at any one time. Cirque des Triangles is in a queue but not necessarily at the back.

So, that’s my crafty Christmas and a jolly nice one it was too 🙂 Thank you everyone!

What’s your favourite crafty gift this year?