Happy Birthday Karen!

I was going to do this post tomorrow which is Karen's actual Birthday.  But since she has already opened her gift and posted it all over Facebook, I'll do it today so you can all go wish her a Very Happy Birthday for the 30th.

A long while ago when we were planning the first Joan Elliott Round Robin, Karen mentioned that Joan's designs often had lovely feet.  We joked that we should do a Foot Fetish Round Robin!

This made me play around with the idea of stitching some of the hands as a collage.  When the second Joan RR started up this year I felt I did not have the time to join in as I was already committed to the Large Mirabilia RR as well as finishing the Band Sampler RR.

Karen was so disappointed not to be stitching with me again we decided to do a small Birthday card exchange of one of Joan's designs.  Our Birthdays are only a couple of weeks apart.  This was when the idea of resurrecting my Hands collage came to my mind.  I decided on the Four Seasons as being the designs which went together the best.  The piece needed to work as a whole composition not just four random hands on a piece of fabric.

I spent some time with pencil and paper then started stitching.  The fabric is a piece of 28 count from a Crafty Kitten grab bag.  Here is the final design:

And here are some close-ups:

Spring

Summer

Autumn

Winter

I attempted to make a flat-fold but it was a disaster!!  So I simply mounted the design on a piece of scrapbooking paper and sent it to Karen to frame as a picture.  Now despite saying "just a card" Karen had put some lovely goodies into my package so I had to reciprocate!!

Here is the package she sent me:

plus a lovely stitching project bag.

Finally, I got my copy of Just Cross Stitch Christmas Ornament Special yesterday.  Love the Dragon Dreams design this year.  One of my targets for next year is to stitch a Dragon Dreams design each month.  The Large Boy does the most perfect impression of this little wide-eyed dragonlet!!