Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all! I hope you have a wonderful Holiday and a Healthy and Happy New Year. Above is the Christmas card I sent to all my family and close friends, it's a needle felt Mama mouse hoisting her child to put the star on top of the tree. I hope to make more of these after the holidays.

Our Christmas Tree

Our beautiful Christmas Tree with the woven star and all my beautiful handmade ornaments.

Christmas Windows in NYC

I love New York City at Christmas time; the lights that light the streets, the fairs that pop up all over, the Rockefeller Center tree, and the windows along Fifth Avenue. I can remember coming to NYC at Christmas, when I was a little girl, seeing the windows with my aunts and it is still one of my favorite things to do at Christmas time. My favorites are always the Bergdorf windows, so creative and so fun, This year was no exception, the Men's windows were all Fantastic Mr. Fox sets and figures. I must admit I wasn't looking forward to seeing The Fantastic Mr. Fox, however after seeing all the wonderful detail and design in the sets and adorable characters I am quite anxious to see it. How cute is the motorcycle one? I am a total sucker for animals in gentlemanly apparel.

The other Bergdorf had my absolute favorite window this year (above). All the paper sculptures, so creative, so amazing. I went twice to see it and each time I found more and more with every glance.

Weekend

This weekend was a great weekend! I went to two craft fairs, had homemade ginger ale, went fabric shopping and made some Christmas stockings with my Lovely!Though it was a terribly rainy day, the turn out at the Martha Stewart craft fair was very impressive. I saw a lot of beautiful crafts and met some sweet people. I also bought the most wonderful basket-weave star which I intend to use as my tree topper (photo to follow soon).




After the Martha Stewart fair we went to the Handmade Cavalcade which also had wonderful crafts and jewelry.

The turn out was also impressive.



It began to snow, so we headed to Noho Star for some lunch and freshly made ginger ale. Then a quick stop at one of the best fabric stores downtown, Purl Soho where I picked up the felt for the Christmas stocking that my boyfriend and I made, below.
My stocking is the one with the little snowy village, and the snowman caterpillar is my boyfriend's. The eyelet trim, used for the roofs is what encouraged me to do the village in the first place. I began to play with trim and thought it looked a lot like a Victorian house's roof trim, thus my snow village was born.

12 Ornaments of Christmas

I have decided to make a post on 12 ornaments I have been making for my Christmas tree. The ornaments are a mixture of needle felt, sculpey, a couple of glass ornaments and some more simply glued felt pieces. A post of my ornaments on my Christmas tree will be up soon.

THANKSGIVING WEEKEND

Hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving, I know I did. It is always a busy time for me because it is when I begin my holiday ornaments and designs (to follow in next post) and it is my beloved's birthday. Every year I make a cake design of something he is loving that year last year it was Wall-E

and this year, my little nerd was loving Star Trek! This has been a long and deeply seeded obsession (we have driven to Canada twice to meet Patrick Stewart) and one I have grown to share. This year with the new movie being a wonderful surprise and all his gift being Star Trek related, I decided the cake should be as well.

It is Saturn with stars coming out and the original enterprise on top. I had several crises, including one where all the frozen veg in my my moms frig fell on the swirled chocolate rings cracking them, but in the end I was just happy it taste delicious. The recipe is a basic chocolate buttermilk cake and a basic vanilla buttermilk cake recipe with alternating raspberry jam, crushed hazelnuts with sugar layers and chocolate hazelnut whip cream layers. SO GOOD! It is my new standby!