In 1984, George Orwell referred to a characteristic called Doublethink - where a person could hold two contradictory ideas but not object. I feel rather like this about Christmas. Don't get me wrong - I absolutely adore the festive season. My already tenuous hold on taste is abandoned gleefully and I enjoy going wild with decorations, gifts, crafts, cooking, entertaining and general merrymaking. However, and this is the sticker, I loathe going into shops in August and finding the shelves filling up with Christmas puddings and cards. To me Christmas should be celebrated and anticipated at the end of the year - shopping and posting should be in darkness and cold, not sunshine. Now here's the doublethink - as a crafter, you simply cannot start too early. All that merrymaking means that it is without doubt the busiest time of the year yet it is also the time when you need to create things like cards and gifts. So to sum up, I am happy to start early for my own crafting but throw a major hissy fit if I so much as sniff something festive in a shop before the end of October.

In this Orwellian spirit, I illustrate the point with two little cross-stitched designs, just completed that will be mounted into cards. They are both by Margaret Sherry who designs frequently for magazines. For the little robin, I used a blending filament along with the dark thread for the backstitch - this gives it a nice twinkle. For the hedgehog, I used a rayon thread for the star - this gives a luxurious finish. On both, I used Thread Heaven for the first time. I have often seen it advertised in magazines as an aid to using metallics, rayons and so on. Having bought some, I tried it out on these small projects and I was completely blown away. It makes using these threads a breeze - normally the air would be blue as they got knotted, tangled, wouldn't thread and so on. Instead, I glided smoothly through - if you haven't tried it, I can recommend it.

I am hoping to build up a small stash of these little Christmas designs for mounting into cards throughout the year, thus avoiding too much late panic by the end of November! Well, that's the plan, anyway. I'll keep this updated as more are added.