Thanksgiving and Ebay Do Not Mix!

Y'all have disappointed me. A few postings ago, I mentioned that I was going to Ebay list my "Snowfaces" candle mat on Thursday night. Out of all the people who have read my blog over the last few days, not one person warned me to not do that on Thursday night.
I've made this mistake before and thankfully I caught it myself before I did list it last night.
So what's wrong with Ebay listing something on a Thursday night???
Usually nothing, except last night is exactly ONE WEEK away from Thanksgiving night. When I Ebay list, it's up for a week. NO ONE is sitting at their computer watching Ebay items on Thanksgiving night. If no one is bidding at the very end of the sale, guess what? SOMEONE will get a bargain! :) While I don't mind so much someone getting a bargain, especially if it's a good repeat customer, I certainly don't want to set myself up to purposely sell it at bargain basement prices.
So my "Snowfaces" Candle Mat will be listed on Sunday night.
You readers need to be more alert, because really, I am such a scatterbrain sometimes, I need the assistance when it comes to things like this.

And now, since I'm speaking about being a scatterbrain .... I've received quite a lot of emails lately. I've tried to respond to questions but there've been times that I put off answering the questions because of lack of time. Then I go back to find the questions, and that email is lost in a sea of new emails asking questions.
So, if you've asked me a question either in comments or via email and I haven't responed to you, please don't be offended. Because of the giveaway, I was bombarded and I lost track of the questions.
Just ask again, please? I don't mind getting questions at all so ask away, but if I don't answer back within a day or two, just understand, I'm scatterbrained and I've either forgotten or I've lost the question!


Ok.

New designs are swirling around in my head and I've so many cute ideas for Christmas candle mats that I just don't have the time to make, the idea occurred to me to make a "sampler" candle mat using one of each of my design ideas.
So, that's how this new drawing started .....

Excuse the bright, glowing date stamp on there. I'm going to be dating most of my design pictures on here for proof of ownership. I'll make a post sometime soon about copyrights and what I've learned recently, but for now just know that my dated pictures have rewarded me with proof of ownership and protected me from copyright thievery and that's invaluable ... and well worth the ugly bright date stamp that you see.

So here in the picture you'll see eight different holiday pictures squeezed onto one candle mat shape. I roughly drew it all out and then roughly colored it in just to give me some help in creating some color balance. Since I have to consider size balance and color balance on the mat, I decided just to cut out each individual pie shape so that I could easily rearrange the shapes to their positions on the mat.

So here, I've kinda settled on this arrangement, knowing that once I actually go upstairs to the woolroom to select the wools, I might have to change it around again.
I spent an entire morning working on this .. getting the pattern drawn and cut out and then figuring out what wools would work best....

This is what I've come up with. Changes had to be made during this whole process. I took out the gingerbread house and made an angel instead. The gingerbread house just has too many tiny details and it just wouldn't fit right into that little pie shape without cramping it. It's going to be a very "busy" little mat as it is so I have to be careful to not make this into something that is heavy with too many details.

The colors changed from what I originally planned because I found a wonderful soft plaid wool with different colors that could be "fussy cut" to make that mitten, the angel and the stocking. They will blend well because it's from the same wool, but they're each slightly different colors. Am I going into waaaay too much detail here? Am I losing you?

hahah .. ok ....

I'm starting to stitch each shape on now, starting with the shapes that I'm most concerned with. The candy canes came first because I wasn't sure if I could manage to make them look like candly canes in such a small space....

Oh and those white stitching lines that section off each pie shape are just quick basting stitches to mark the territories. They'll be pulled out once the mat is finished.

But yeah, I really like how they turned out. The pic is blurry here, sorry. I had to use heavier white wool for these just because there is so much stitching going into the fiber that a lighter weight wool would break down and shred. The heavy wool held up nicely.

After finishing up with the candy canes, I did the mitten. I wanted to put a cute little button snowman on the mitten and I was hoping that the mitten color wasn't going to be too dark to show the snowman arms. It is a bit dark, but I think you can still tell it's a snowman, so I'm happy with this.

I'm now starting to stitch on the angel. She's looking a little large on her pie shape, so I'm going to clip her wings ... just a bit to see if that helps.

That's it for now. I'm hoping to have most of the stitching done by Sunday night and I'll try to show the progress in a Sunday post.

Happy Day everyone!