10 little happy dances

I have finally finished 10 projects, well, the stitching part at least. I still have BeadingButtoningPalooza to attend to. That will be tonight or tomorrow night's project, me figuring out how to attach those crystal things (which I found in the clearance section of Michaels bead area)for the needlepoint ornament and then sewing buttons on things. Then finishing frenzy starts between bouts of cleaning, because our house is, quite honestly, a wreck. We are both getting a little bit twitchy over the situation, and it is going to be remedied this weekend. But, when that is done, and it shouldn't really take that long, it's just doing laundry and figuring out where to put stuff away, along with doing laundry and washing a certain large dog of nefarious odor (Left-brain is handling that task, you name 'em, you bathe em.)

I know I do more talking about this finishing than I ever really get to do, and one of my goals is to do a little less talk and a lot more action in that regard. I have pretty much finished setting up my finishing basket--I bought a cheapo pair of scissors to use to cut the comicbook board I bought a couple months ago to use for flat-finishing, then didn't cut because I didn't want to wreck my good scissors (I swear, I can reason myself out of forward progress in life like a champ). I can wreck these for the $1.99 they cost--and I think I have enough to get some work done. I have decided to finish "Forest Winter" as a banner, so I'm going to try to find a stick to use for the top. We'll have to see how this goes. Our yard backs up to a wooded hill. The sticks that fall into the yard get carried off by the dog, and the ones that fall into the side of the hill, well, to be honest, I'm kind of afraid to go after because I don't know what's on that hill. I know we have rabbits, probably some cats, maybe a fox, but we do have snakes in Maryland, and I'm not that cool with potentially running onto anything bigger than a garter snake. OK I'm not big on running onto one of those. Now that I think about it, they're probably hibernating, but I would the one to come onto a copperhead with insomnia looking for a stick.

I was thinking about something while stitching the last ornament. Stitched ornaments tend to be big. Most of mine are at least as large as the palm of my hand, where the other ones are a little smaller. And they don't always lay right on the Christmas tree when it's decorated. I have a tree that the individual branches pull in and out, a benefit of not having a prelit tree. A few years ago, I saw on HGTV how the decorator pulled every other row of branches out of the artificial tree to create a feather tree effect. They piled big glass balls on top of the rows for a glamourous look, but I was thinking, wouldn't it be possible to do the same feather tree effect, but with my ornaments and just hang them back the branches. I figure I could cover the parts of the tree where the missing rows go with either wrapped lights or ribbon. I know it would be a different look, and probably would take a little getting used to, but then again, feather trees are whimsical, I like whimsical, and really, what's the point of having that tree if I can't play with it? What do you think? Can you picture something like that?