At the December meeting of Skipton Stitchers we have a lovely tradition of making a hand-made Christmas card to swop. Anyone who wishes to take part just makes a card, writes a Christmas greeting from them inside, adds it to the pile at the meeting and takes one out.

It does mean I have to think of a quick card to make each December as invariably I leave it until the day before!!

This year I decided to do some teabag embroidery. We had a workshop on it earlier in the year, it’s basically stitching on a used, dried teabag. I had previously collected some teabags, dried them out, made a little snip in the back to empty the tea out and pressed them. All that I needed to do was add some iron-on interfacing to the back to give a bit of strength… and think of something to stitch.

I had a little perusal on Pinterest and spotted a few to give me ideas. The good thing about stitching on teabags is that they’re only small, so it doesn’t take much to cover it. I had a look in my ort jar and found a few scraps of lace.

I arranged them so they looked like a snowy hill. I think this bit took the longest as I kept trying different pieces of lace and different positions. I was particularly pleased with the top piece as it looks like trees on the top of the hill. I stitched them on with some basic sewing thread. I cut a triangle out of some Christmas fabric, fussy cutting it over a tree so I already had a basic pattern on it. I stitched the tree on with fly stitch, a few straight stitches made the trunk. All that was left to stitch was a tiny gold sequin on the top.

I mounted it on some cotton paper and stuck that to a red card. My card was ready. It didn’t take long at all and I’m pretty pleased with it,