Welcome to 2025

Hello friends and happy 2025 to you, ha ha, just as we hit the last week of January! 

Glenn and I are both back at work after our summer break, Hannah is back to high school for Year 12 (second to last year) for course confirmation later this week and peer mentor training, and then her school year officially kicks off next week. 

The weather here after Christmas was pretty crazy, as you'll see later on my post, lots of rain so some of our summer holiday plans didn't eventuate but that's ok, there were plenty of things to do around home and Glenn made some great progress on painting our house and other jobs.

So here's bit of a round up from Christmas and New Year before I get on with this year's goings on in another post or two.

These dahlia's from my aunty's garden are just so "Christmasy" - I've asked if I can have a tuber or two, they remind me of candy canes. 

Glenn took us out for our annual Christmas eve lunch, this year to a new-ish Indian restaurant in town. 

Christmas Day was such a lovely day, started with a walk along the river trail with Diesel. We had family come for Christmas dinner and enjoyed all the usual Kiwi Christmas treats.

I made a chocolate brownie trifle, which everyone loves, and it's so much better the next day!

Between Christmas and New Year, we easily filled our days with house painting, a shopping trip for the Boxing day sales, catch ups with family and friends, decluttering and lots of stitching, reading, watching Netflix, etc. 

As I mentioned, our weather has not been very summer like, we even had snow on the ranges to the east of town on the 5th January, this is the view from the end of our driveway. My parents even had their fire going, crazy stuff!

More holiday adventures to share in my next few posts.

Moving onto a stitching update - this is the stitching bag I made for our stitching group's Christmas Swap, the design is by Primrose Cottage Stitches. 

I decided to order this year's Book Of Days by Needlework Press to record my stitching and plans. It couldn't travel on its own from That Crafty Kiwi so ordered the cutest needle minder and some fabrics.

The two holiday stitching projects I chose to stitch over the break are both finished - 

Santa & Cardinal Birdhouse by Jim Shore for Mill Hill:

Christmas Magic by Primrose Cottage Stitches, stitched on 32 count natural Belfast linen using the recommended DMCs.

For the rest of my holidays I've mostly stitched on the Christmas Cuckoo House by the Tiny Modernist. I'm hoping to finish it this week then I can move on to some of my 2025 stitching plans. I have so many things I'd like to work on this year, including some red work embroidery projects, which I haven't done for quite some time.

See you soon xx