Stand Up for Christmas

While we were in Philadelphia I picked up a couple of pieces to stitch for the  ANG annual auction. It's a sort of bonus, a piece of needlepoint that looks like fun to stitch, but which I can then send back.
I ended up with two pieces, a Carol Singer and a Gate, both of which were part of a larger set of carol singers.

I am always impressed by wrought iron work and this gave me the chance to stitch some. Not surprisingly, I used a lot of black Kreinik metallic threads to get the dull sheen of the wrought iron, and to give the holly a shine I used more Kreinik in green and red. The cat is worked in DMC Medici. The gates and cat are worked in tent stitch, the background is stitched with a very fine machine embroidery silver in a diagonal skip stitch.

The second piece is one of the carol singers,

I used a wider variety of threads and stitches on the carol singer to show the different fabrics of her dress, fur muff, jacket, woolly hat and cloak. Like the gates, the background was completed in a diagonal skip stitch with the same fine silver.

I was able to see the completed set of carol singers before they were auctioned.

It took me just over 100 hours to stitch both pieces. I don't know how long it took to do the others, but if you were one of the stitchers on this set, well done!