TUSAL of Tradition

It's TUSAL time again!  For those of you new to blogging, the TUSAL is a project run by Daffycat, click on the button on the right hand bar for more details.

This year I have been stitching The Little Stitcher's Twelve Days of Christmas as a monthly project.  Laura has designed twelve charts with a different theme for each one to represent the days of Christmas.  She has invented the different themes herself using her lovely imagination!

This week I have stitched The Day of Tradition.  Here it is as part of my TUSAL photo:

Alongside Acorn House Designs Merry Christmas

and close-up on it's own:

I have been debating all year how to finish these 12 designs and when I found a mini scrapbook with just the right number of pages I knew I could make a little book out of them using different festive scrapbook pages.  When I received the JCS Christmas Ornie preview mag I knew I had found my cover for the book too.

This design originally had Miss Santa underneath which I recharted and stitched the title over one so it would fit.  I have made six pages in the book and have six more to do, plus the facing pages and the cover.  I plan to finish this off over the Christmas holiday.

This month the theme is Tradition and what could be more appropriate for the time of year?  There are so many traditions it's harder to think of something we do which ISN'T a tradition!  We usually get the tree the weekend before Christmas because we have a real one and don't want it dropping before Twelfth Night.  Here it is all decorated up:

And here is one with the lights switched on:

The ornaments on the tree are a variety of gold. silver, red and crystal I have collected over the 27 years I have owned my own home.  There are "First Christmas" ornaments for both boys too.  This year there was one new ornament; here is it in Santa's sleigh:

If you squint you can probably see who sent it!

And here it is on the tree:

In case you couldn't make out the name, this ornie came all the way from The Devil's Playground from our own lovely Shirlee the Easily Influenced Stitcher.  It is beautifully stitched and finished with a lovely beaded handle.  Thank you Shirlee!  I love my ornie and it will be a fixture on my tree for evermore.

Finally, a Public Service Announcement courtesy of Aurelia Eglantine.  There is a glitsch in Blogger whereby a fake Captcha appears on blogs when the Comment Box is a pop-up (like mine used to be!).  It asks you to tick a box to prove you are not a robot and then enter some numbers.  You can, however, still post a comment by ignoring this.  Hopefully Blogger will fix the glitsch soon but if you have found your comments are fewer just lately then the solution is to make your Comment Box embedded into the blog.  This is easily done by amending your comment settings in your Dashboard.