Festive Season Thank You Presents

Christmas has been quite 'lazy' for me this year as yesterday was spent at our Niece's house and today we will be at my brother and sister-in-law's house. In fact yesterday, when going to get some milk out, I couldn't help but remark to John that we must be the only house at Christmas that had a pretty empty fridge!

As a last minute thing, I decided to make some thank you scented pouches for our Christmas hostesses. These were actually freebies with the Cross Stitcher magazine a few months ago and I just liked them and had been stitching the white and red cross stitch hearts over a few weeks whilst sitting in bed of an evening!

The cross stitch front is stitched on gingham material, which is actually harder to cross stitch on than I thought it would be. The back, which you can't see, is red felt. I sewed them up on Christmas Eve by sewing machine. I decided to make them scented following a post I'd read on The Unbroken Thread. I took a stick of cinnamon, a couple of tablespoons of cloves and a nutmeg and whizzed them round in my food processor. However, this is clearly not the thing to do with the nutmeg! From time to time it got stuck on one of the food processor blades, so in the end, I just grated it. I then made two small pouches from some very thin material I had in my workbox and put the chopped up and slightly powdery mix in them. These then went into the hearts with ordinary polyester stuffing around them.

I have to say, the room smelt wonderful whilst doing this!

The little 'labels' were my own idea. They are just oblongs of aida with back stitch lettering. I then used iron on interfacing on the back to both stiffen them and cover the reverse of my stitching. A simple line of running stitches with embroidery floss then attaches the labels to the ribbon.

Claire loved her one yesterday and Rowena gets her one later today.