OhSewCrafty Blog

• Pattern: kit by Mill Hill, Christmas Village Buttons & Beads
• Materials, Kit floss & beads, 28 ct stormy grey jobelan
• Size: 5″ square plus about 1.5″ wide border
• Time to stitch: 9 days

My first piece of the Christmas village is complete and I’m thrilled!

The pattern is fine, easy to read, and wonderful instructions.  Mill Hill kits are a great way to dip your toes into beading.  Tree Farm took a bit longer to stitch than I expected since it is almost full coverage, and heavily beaded.  But 9 days isn’t too bad.  Since I’m trying to finish one of these per quarter, I might see if I can devote 3 days per month. I’m adding a snowflake border in Kreinik #4 braid, color #32.  I ran out of the (partial) spool that I had in my stash, so I wasn’t able to complete the border on the left side.  I do love it though.  It’s a rather subtle effect, yet sparkly, and exactly what I wanted.

The materials are good.  I swapped out the perforated paper, obviously.  My plan is to stitch 12 of these buildings together on a big piece of fabric.  I adore the 28 count stormy grey jobelan.  It’s soft, wonderful to stitch on, and the softly variegated grey makes a lovely winter background.  Honestly I’d only use perforated paper for ornaments, anyway.  The kit includes DMC floss.  

There are 7 colors of beads, which were in 3 bags.  I basically work with one bag at a time, spill it onto my tacky bob and from there I am able to easily pick up the gold beads, for example, leaving the white ones for the next step.  For this project I did stitch on one color of bead at a time with matching floss, per the directions, it just seems easier that way.  The beads included are Mill Hill, of course.  I had plenty, but I had to toss a few since those were malformed.  There is also a pretty handpainted button, which will go atop the lamp post at left, but I’ll wait until the end to attach the buttons because I’m rolling this up in a scroll frame.  I’ll use quilt batting to protect the beads as I scroll.

My favorite part is all the sparkle, of course!  I like the sign too, “Trees 4 Sale”.  The only tricky part was attaching the swag of beads along the roofline of the shack. As I stitched the swag per the directions, I tried to leave some slack in the floss so the beads would lay flat on the fabric and not pop up.  That looked sloppy though.  So I used a normal tension, the beads popped up, and then I used the floss to tack down each swag, in the middle, to the fabric.  

Now that Tree Farm is finished, I’m really excited about the Christmas Village project.  I’m planning to start Toy Shop, “next door”, later this month.