A Trio Of Finishes

After I finished the first of the Little House Needleworks' Christmas Farmhouse series, I wanted to finish (FFO) it right away to see how it would turn out. Using The Twisted Stitcher's directions on Youtube, I gathered my supplies and went to work. Here's the result.

It was stitched on 30 count natural Northern Cross linen using the called for threads. I purchased the backing fabric and the ribbon for the bow at Hobby Lobby, and I got the jute trim at Joann's. The rusty jingle bells were found at Factory Craft Direct online. If you haven't visited Factory Craft, I urge you to - they have so many fun and useful supplies for crafting!

Next up is a FFO for a finish I stitched a couple of years ago. I found "Snow Birds" by Country Cottage Needleworks in the 2013 issue of the Just Cross Stitch Christmas issue.

I used the same basic pillow ornament finishing technique and added some fluffy white chenille trim on the edge. The hangers were left off because I'll probably display this one and the Farmhouse Christmas ornament some other way than hanging them on the tree. 

Finally, a Halloween finish! "Scaredy Cats" by Mill Hill was a recent finish and I knew I wanted to frame it. I purchased some unfinished frames from the Etsy store Nice Frames. Using some acrylic craft paint, I mixed up a kind-of rusty orange and put a couple of coats on the frame.

The color is actually darker in real life. I had a very bright orange paint and I wanted to darken it a bit and tone the brightness down. So I added black. Big mistake. Don't do it. It turned into a really bad, unusable color. So I did what I should have done in the first place. I Googled it and found out that to make a rusty orange, you need to add BLUE to orange. It worked. You can still see the knots in the frame, but I like that.

And those are my finishes for this post. I hope you liked seeing them. If you have any questions, please let me know. Today I'm doing some fabric dyeing. It's a fun, crazy, messy experiment. So tune in to my blog again because I'll be posting about that soon!