Christmas humbug

Well, that title has really Dickensian overtones, doesn’t it?!

About a week ago I posted about an idea I was having for adapting my Christmas decoration into a tetrahedron or triangular pyramid shape. I was reliably informed by several commenters that this shape is now referred to as a humbug, due to the resemblance to a lolly (candy) of that shape. Now, being a bit of a young-un, I’ve never heard of humbugs before, so I’ll just take your word for it!

Veronica referred me to the Victoria Sampler website where they had a competition earlier this year for a humbug shaped Christmas decoration.

I’ve made a little progress on my adaptation.
Its not finished yet as it needs more beads hanging off the bottom, but you can see how it is going. I feel it turned out a bit small – by looking at the needle it might give you a bit of an idea of scale.

I used beads rather than the Gilt Sylke Twist because its for my younger daughter’s teacher who loves sparkly things. She recently told me that she’s the type of person who puts glitter in envelopes with cards so that when people pull the card out, glitter goes everywhere. I told her that I’m glad she doesn’t send me cards!

So I think its OK, but I just would have preferred it turned out a bit bigger. I do like the way the design wraps around the shape and joins up with itself at the joins – I carefully stitched it by hand so that it would be just so (oh no, now a Kipling reference…).

An addendum to yesterday’s post about bullions. I mentioned that I spent the day “wrestling” with them. I just want to qualify that I did not mean I was having trouble with the bullions! I merely meant that I had such a huge quantity to get through that I felt like I was having a bit of a battle with them! I’m actually quite happy with my bullion technique itself, otherwise I wouldn’t presume to teach others how to do them in my books or with my bullion stitch tutorials. 🙂