All your cupcakes are belong to us

This is what almost 90 cupcakes looks like. No, I am not going to eat them all. And yes, it is rather difficult to make red icing. For the record: 12 egg whites, 4 boxes of cake mix, two ovens going, and a partidge in a pear tree. Oh, wait, forget that last one. These will be delivered tonight.





This went in the mail today:

And contains a secret message:

To make up for being knit in that color. These have been mostly finished for a while, although it took me some time to get around to putting the booties together and then I had to buy the buttons for them. I did size them down from the original pattern by knitting with smaller needles, but after seeing a friend's 6 week old girl today, the booties have to get much smaller for newborns. Oh, well.

On the stitching front: A new model arrived and it is gorgeous! Kudos to Faye my model stitcher this time! Sorry, no pictures until after Nashville Market opens - lets just say that if you like Labyrinth and Maze, you'll like this one (and it will complete the series). Speaking of completing a series, I'm coming along on the Ancient world sampler. Although I haven't gotten to stitch on it much this week (did you see the 90 cupcakes at the top of this post), I have gotten some more design work done on it, including the border. For all of these pieces, there is a certain amount of research that goes into the work aside from the designing, so the border had to reflect the design styles and motifs of the people who are represented by the sampler. It also has to fit in the space of the sampler (all of the Ancient World samplers are exactly the same size). Next, I have to work on the columns and then the glyphs/alphabet for the piece. I'm personally hoping to get a bunch of stitching done over the holidays.

I don't know how much I'll post in the coming days as the holiday rush creeps in, so for everyone reading, happy holidays, happy New Year, stay safe and stay warm.