A Very Merry Christmas 2018 Recap

(Photo from here.)

I love the holiday season. My favorite part of the holidays is definitely the lead up to Christmas because that's when everyone seems to be in a better mood. There's decorating, yummy dinners, holiday treats, spending time with family and friends, exchanging Christmas cards, wrapping gifts, hanging ornaments on the Christmas tree, and just general activities that really set up the holiday cheer. Today I wanted to share a little bit of what we've been up to the last few weeks.

A Christmas How-To: Finishing a Cross-Stitch Stocking

I am so excited to share this that I am interrupting my very belated and very drawn-out recap of Italy to bring you a little Christmas-inspired "How To" for the inquiring mind.

Based on recent experience, I realized that there is little no instruction or YouTube video about how to finish a cross-stitch stocking.

Backing and framing your finished cross-stitch project? Sure.
Whole lessons on how to do various types of stitches? You bet.
How to turn your stocking from aida to actual stocking? Nope.

I realize this a very niche topic and most people will absolutely not care in the slightest BUT for you lucky person out there that found this post after squiring the internet and finding a blasphemous lack of clear instruction for stocking stitchery, this is for you! To be fair, this post is also 100% selfish as I plan to use it for future reference if I ever make another stocking. If it's on the blog I can't lose it!

So here is how you do it.

Travel Day - Naples to Venice + Pompeii Purple Swatch

Ahhh, lord these delays are killing me. Well, let's pick up where we left off, shall we? The next day in our Italian anniversary trip was a travel day (read: a realllllly long train ride between Naples and Venice) so I don't really have that many worthwhile photos for this particular day to share. Notwithstanding this lack of blogworthy photos, I figure since last post was about Pompeii that now would be as good a time as any for some swatch photos of OPI Pompeii Purple....which is distinctly more pink than purple as it turns out....all while sprinkling in some travel day photos.