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Tuesday 2 January 2018

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:


or this one:


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


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:


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:






7 comments:

Rita said...

I love the themes for 2018! Happy New Year, everyone!

Kaisievic said...

Hey Jo, Happy New Year and great post. Thx for all the inspiration. My fingers agree itching to stitch some of these when i get home. Xxx

Kaisievic said...

Sorry, are itching!

Mary's Thread said...

Thanks for this very very interesting post! And it is the kick in the pants I need, I have this Victoria Sampler kit and now I have the perfect excuse to do it! Starting today!

Jo who can't think of a clever nickname said...

That's awesome! Glad that I could enable.

Stitching Noni said...

Great inspirational post Jo... and some great ideas for the January theme :o)

Khristine Doiron said...

Not that you have to this every month but I hope you do! Lots of inspiration!! And fun to read!