February - Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer Inspiration

February's theme is one of the more modern Christmas Carols we have for this year - Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.

Originally Santa had 8 reindeer, as listed in the poem 'Twas the Night Before Christmas but in 1939 Robert L. May introduced us to the 9th Reindeer - young Rudolph.  His booklet was published by a department store Montgomery Ward who clearly knew a good marketing tool when they saw one!

Original cover art for the book

You can read the story behind the story on Wikipedia here - Wikipedia Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer

The booklet was followed by a short animation (1948), THE song (1949), various comic books (1950 onwards) and an animated television special in 1964.

By this time Rudolph's story is firmly fixed in our Christmas traditions and he is indeed the "Most Famous Reindeer of all!"

There are so many versions of Rudolph on YouTube, here's a cute one:

And a Heavy Metal version!  The lyrics are different but clean, if you are listening with children!

As with versions of the song, there are many cross stitched designs for you to choose from.

Lizzie*Kate Dear Rudolph

Nora Corbett Rudolph

Our own Daffycat has designed a series of small reindeer which I stitched into a cube finish:

Many of us have the annual Just Cross Stitch Christmas Ornament Special issue and there are always Rudolph charts in there.  One of them is the April choice for a Facebook group - JCS Stitch Along

On the Runway by Snoflake Stitchery

Model photo from the magazine.

Looking forward to seeing a whole herd of Rudolph stitchery this month!

January - Deck the Halls Inspiration

Thanks to the inspiration from Mary, we have various Christmas songs for the themes to our stitching this year.  I thought this was a wonderful idea and I was pleased to see Kaye managed to add a video of the song and the lyrics too in her last post of 2017.

I thought I'd do a little research and share the results with you.  Deck the Halls is based on a Welsh song called Nos Galan dating back to the 16th Century.   The Welsh version was a New Year song which makes it particularly appropriate for January's theme.  The English words were written by a Scottish musician in 1862. 

This clip includes both English and Welsh versions

Here's a more modern version by SHeDaisy which some of you may recognise from a certain Disney movie:

And just for fun, here are some animals joining in with the song:

On to stitching.  This song provides so many ideas for our stitching.  You could chose the words Deck the Halls or Fa, La, La for a typographic design such as this one:

Drawn Thread - Deck the Halls

or this one:

Little House Needleworks - Fa La La

There are any number of designs with holly on them, with or without words.  This one is from Victoria Sampler:

Victoria Sampler - Boughs of Holly

And for a freebie there is this design from Gazette94 which I stitched in 2012.  She designed it as a New Year chart which fits rather nicely with the Welsh version of the song:

Gazette 94 - Bonne Annee

The final design I will show for inspiration is a large sampler I stitched back in 1995 from a chart in Cross Stitch Collection magazine: