Last Saturday afternoon Dunchurch Junior School was buzzing with the excitement of the 2014 DBC Christmas Craft Event; more than 60 children came and made penguin wise men, gift bags, Christmas cards, sparkly candle holders, and of course stitched bookmarks!

The design this year was much freer than usual – the children were given a kit with a pinked blue felt bookmark, black sticky felt to tidy up the back after stitching, 5 silver and gold star sequins, stranded cotton (blue, red or green) to attach them wherever they liked, and white, yellow, red and green crochet cotton to embellish the rest of the bookmark with letters, lines, holly leaves or whatever else took their fancy, either drawn on with gel pen or freehand. And boy did it unleash their creativity! Nimble fingers produced letters of all shapes and sizes, a great variety of constellations, satin stitch berries and even a Christmas tree.

I didn’t take a picture of one impressive bookmark produced at my table that day: young James put a star in each of the corners and then traced a big J in running stitch. It was the very first stitching he had ever done. Well done him! Can you imagine how proud (and surprised) his mum was?

My second Christmas craft has a rather more immediate deadline than I intended. Last year I forgot to bring cards to our stitching group’s Christmas lunch, and promised I’d make up for it by giving them all a hand-stitched card this year. That’s 12 cards. And our Christmas lunch is not next Wednesday, as I blissfully thought, but this Wednesday. I’ve got some speedy stitching to do…

P.S. I’m rethinking the double cable stitch border on Orpheus, which looks as though it might make the centre a bit too crowded; the single cable stitch I’ve done so far (with small bits of double) may well be enough.