Happy New Year!

I want to say thank you to everyone who has bought a design from Pickle Barrel Designs in the last year, thank you to each and every person that has taken the time to email me and that I look forward to a fabulous 2013 with all of you - Happy Stitching indeed!!!

Love, Nancy

Another year looms ....

Full of so many new stitching opportunities! I am in the midst of stitching a Christmas ornament to submit to Just Cross Stitch magazine to consider for their 2013 Ornament Issue - the good news is that they just accepted my Halloween design for the specialty Halloween issue so the new year is off to a grand start before it has really started!

We returned from our family vacation in the Bahamas and stayed at the very fabulous Atlantis Resort - only drawback was the insane prices for food and beverages - I'm talking $9 for a bottle of water and $32 for a side Caesar salad - wow, talk about having sticker shock! I will never ever complain about restaurant prices in Fargo ever again!!!p

Every good vacation must come to an end!

Alas it is time to head back home to reality and cold snowy weather! Went through the lost city of Atlantis so here are some wonderful photos I wanted to share - happy stitching!

Christmas Day

Spent the day beside a pool and walking beside the ocean - kids wanted to know if Santa would be able to find them so we said he must have left their presents at home instead of on vacation! Nothing like a turkey buffet dinner that shouts Christmas Dinner!

Christmas Eve.....

Is Santa on his way to your house tonight? Hopefully you have all landed on the NICE list instead of the naughty list???? Have yourselves a merry little Christmas tomorrow!

Merry Christmas a little early!

We dropped the snow for the sunshine and from our house to your's may you have a beautiful Holiday Season and surround yourself with love, family and wonderful memories!

Another New Release! "WINTER ALPHABET"

Another brand new design available at the end of this month entitled "Winter Alphabet"...it will make you smile seeing the little hockey player, an icy igloo along with all kinds of wintery symbols!

Introducing..."MR. SHIVERS"!

A brand new snowman chart release called MR. SHIVERS that is available this week! I just shipped it out to my distributor so your local needlework stores so they should be able to order it through Hoffman Distributing. Isn't Mr. Shivers too cute with his colorful scarf and oh-so-witty saying that he will work for freezer space! Leave your comments and let me know how you like it!

Happy Hanukkah!

Well we were oh so busy today making potato latkes (I could literally LIVE on these little fried babies!!!) which we had with apple sauce and sour cream for dinner tonight and both of our kids helped light the menorah at sun down. No matter what your religion is, everyone can relate to celebrating customs and traditions that go along with your beliefs and from my family to your family I wish you peace, happiness and memorable family times during the month of December.

Keep checking back as I will be posting some new giveaways this week AND a brand new snowman design I just released called "Mr. Shivers"!

The Wonder and Awe of being a child....

Isn't it amazing to see the look of pure awe when little kids see something that they find utterly amazing...our 4 year old is fascinated with trains... Toy Trains. Real Trains. Thomas the Train. Anything train related, no joking!!! May you have a joyful season and for those of you who are Jewish may you have a very Happy Hanukkah - there will be plenty of latkes frying tonight in our house not to mention a few games of spin the dreidel!

Christmas on the Prairie

At an old time town here, they celebrated the start of the Christmas Season last Saturday - I wanted to share a couple photos from the afternoon to help get you in the mood for Christmas!

Thanks to Nataly at Nataly's Needlework Creations for her FABULOUS giveaway of Pickle Barrel Designs this coming weekend so if you haven't already been over to her blog then show her some love with a visit and while there just leave her a comment to enter the draw for charts!

Happy Stitching!

Dreaming of a white Christmas...

....because ALL of our snow melted this weekend - how very strange the weather has been although I would be happy to have a green Christmas thankyouverymuch!

Better than an Academy Award....comes the LIEBSTER AWARD!

Liebster Award

 The rules of this award which were forwarded to me are:

The recipient will:

1. Pass along this award to five other bloggers who have less than 200 followers.

2. Inform those bloggers individually, and they will inform you that they received it.

3. Once received the blogger shall place the Liebster award on their blog in a post along with the bloggers they will pass it on to.


Good Morning Ladies!!!!  Well and perhaps the occasional stitching man-friend!  I got a blog post today from BEA at PRUPERTGIRL.BLOGSPOT.COM and she awarded me the Liebster Award so let me begin my acceptance speech right now - hehehehehe - I am enjoying all of these new things that come along in the stitching world, and the really good news is that my oh-so-smart blogger sister has officially moved in with us after her move from Canada, and since she is the guru to how blogs work, she has offered to help me improve my l'il blog to something slicker and more important, prettier!  So stay tuned and sometime over Christmas new things will start to show up and comments are always welcome on how you like the changes.

Otherwise, there are only about 3 weeks left until the kids are off on vacation for Christmas, we are all gearing up for a visit from that Jolly Old Man in a Red Suit, I have a ton of great new design ideas for the coming year, I am getting things designed and stitched for release at Nashville Market in February, AND right now I am furiously stitching a Halloween design to submit to Just Cross Stitch Magazine for their 2013 Halloween Ornament Issue (deadline is Dec. 15) and then another one to stitch to submit for the Christmas Ornament Issue but I do believe I have until early January to submit that ornament design fully stitched - whew, all this work and so little time!
 
 

http://ccsstitchingdiary.blogspot.com/ (Carla))

http://stjohnsstitcher.blogspot.com/ (Melissa)

http://cozycottageinthewoods.blogspot.com/ (Patti)

http://heartinstitches.blogspot.com/ (Michelle)

http://noahstitcher5.blogspot.com/ (Sue)

I hope you enjoy these blogs along with me!

Ho Ho Ho!

Have you all started your Christmas shopping now that Thanksgiving has gobbled by? Was anyone brave enough to shop on Black Friday? Macy's has a special Christmas bus tour going across the country to raise money for the Make A Wish Foundation and Santa and 2 Elves hopped off the bus and were led into our local store by bagpipers - quite the scene - took our two little ones out to see it all and our 4 year old ended up on the news watching Santa read. "'twas the Night Before Christmas" - oh to be young again!

What I am thankful for....

I am so thankful for so many things...for a wonderful and loving husband and two beautiful spirited children, for my sister who is moving here, for having a roof over my head and food on my table, for all of the cross stitch opportunities I have had during 2012, to all of you who have helped spread the word about Pickle Barrel Designs, and for every last person who bought one of my designs - to all of this I humbly say Thank You and Happy Thanksgiving.

Ahhhh the stitching possibilities!

I am getting all of my stash organized and thought my baskets of fresh never-been-stitched-on-fabric was just too spectacular NOT to take a photo of so here you are - just think of all those design possibilities...so here is my request to all of you...leave me a comment on what you might like to see such as snowmen, 4th of July, Halloween, Christmas, babies, kids themes, etc. I would LOVE to hear your ideas!!!

Stitching and being too busy SIGH!

Sorry I have not been posting nearly as much as I usually do but life somehow got too busy this month...go figure! My sister is moving here in two weeks and since she will be moving in with us for a few months I have been busy cleaning out our storage room, dropping loads of stuff at the local Goodwill and more. Yesterday I started working on my cross stitch empire - our guest room became my surrogate space to store all of my stitching supplies, patterns, ideas and everything related to Pickle Barrel Designs...it is both good and bad at the same time - good in that I have no choice but to finally get myself organized and bad only in that it takes so much time to do it all which means my stitching and designing time took a direct hit. Oh well there is not much I can do about it because we are thrilled to have my sister moving here finally hurray!!!!! I hope everyone is enjoying this incredibly fast lead up to Thanksgiving and if you can believe it... Christmas in just over a month - OH MY!!!!

New Release Coming - CHRISTMAS ALPHABET

Hurray, I will be releasing the brand new "Christmas Alphabet" design this week to my distributor so it should be available to your local stores shortly after that - let me know how you like it! Also coming up is a "Winter Alphabet" design in another month! Can you believe that there is only 6 weeks until Christmas??!!!!!!

Another Halloween over and out!

Our kids had a grand old time out trick or treating last night - lots of candy, lots of cute costumes and lots of glowing pumpkins - so I thought I would share some spooktacular photos from the big day - enjoy!

I left my heart in San Francisco

Well, not really because I actually married my husband in San Francisco but I was going through some storage boxes this morning and came across some pics from Dec 26, 2000 when I had my VIP Tour to the very top of the Golden Gate Bridge...both pics show how faaaaar down it was to the deck of the bridge and the water in the Bay - the one pic that shows my brown loafers at the top was taken after my police escort up to the top said if you step a little bit forward and point your camera straight down you will get the best picture ever - now looking back on it 12 years later maybe he was short on oxygen to his brain to suggest that photo option but I might have been even more insane to actually try it - eeeeeeeek! Happy Halloween everyone!

It's a TRICK and not a TREAT!!!

Now didn't I just say in my last posting that I thought the sky looked like snow? Well here is what we woke up to this morning - poor Mr. Pumpkin looks a little cold!!! I suppose though that we should be thankful that we don't live on the East Coast and have "Frankenstorm" barreling at us right now - you all need to take the storm preparations seriously by the look of things - that and a 7.7 earthquake off the coast of British Columbia last night - what the word?!!!

Winter is a'coming!

I'm afraid that it is only a matter of time before Old Man Winter makes his appearance...since yesterday the temperature has gone down consistently and the wind kicked up. I spent this morning with the help of our 4 year old cleaning out the planters and container gardening plants still left over from summer growing projects...then we swept the leaves off the deck, I climbed waaaay up a ladder and cleaned the leaves out of our rain gutters on the house then we raked the front yard and took a full load of leaves off to the recycling center - what fine little citizens we are! Here's a picture I snapped of the sky looking sort of funky but definitely looking like it wanted to snow - just not quite yet please Old Man Winter.

Another new sampler in the works...

I have started stitching a second sampler design - another old treasured piece that I bought at an online auction - it was stitched over 100 years ago - wow, just imagine if those threads could talk. That's what I love about needlework is that it is timeless and has such history attached to it. So let me know how you like this little sneak peek at my reproduction - the original used some funky bright colors so I toned it down a bit to more earthy colors. Happy Stitching!

My Santa ornament in the new issue of Just Cross Stitch magazine!

I was excited to get my new copy of Just Cross Stitch magazine in the mail yesterday and flipped it open to the Table of Contents and discovered my Santa Squared Christmas ornament design featured on page 33, not to mention the picture of it that also showed up in the table of contents! It's a fun and whimsical design so why not pick up your copy of the magazine today!

Stepping out of my comfort zone!

So those of you who have bought my designs before are familiar with my "style" of cross stitch designing - fun, bright, and all those things! Now I am trying something new (in addition to my regular style of designing that you all love)...I'm talking about reproduction samplers! I have recently purchased 3 different samplers in on-line auctions. All 3 designs are by different people, all were stitched sometime in the mid to late 1800's and all caught my eye at first glance. I hope you will all join my journey into doing some of the beautiful samplers as I re-chart and stitch each one to release at Nashville Market next February...here's a little taste of my first design - I hope you like it and the other two which will follow. Happy Stitching!

"CHRISTMAS HODGEPODGE" - New!

Thank you to everyone that submitted ideas for names for this Christmas Sampler and in the end "CalamityJR" came up with the winning title of "Christmas Hodgepodge"! The design will be available for your local needlework store to order within the next week!

Election choices anyone?

Well then! Looks like our US Presidential Election is in its final stages (thank goodness because quite frankly I am sooooo sick of all these rude and obnoxious ads on TV) - so here are the 2 choices - may the best one win!

New Release! "CHRISTMAS ALPHABET"!

Another fun Christmas themed design with a little bit of everything Holiday related! I will have it ready to send out to Hoffman Distributing so your local shop should be able to order it through them anytime after next Friday! Let me know what you all think of the design!

What the word - SNOW!!!!

OK so I think that Mother Nature is playing with us because we went from 84 degrees on Monday to having snow this morning - here's what the weather is doing in my yard this morning!

History and more...

My sister is in town and on Sunday morning we took a little history tour in Fargo/Moorhead starting with the Hjemkost Center in Moorhead, Minnesota....a salute to the Norwegian history of this part of North Dakota.

Falling leaves!

Well so much for cool crisp Fall weather since it is 88 degrees here today! Took the kids to a Fall Festival this morning and they loved it

Now for all of you who left a comment for me regarding the last posting for the first day of Fall just send me an email at picklebarreldesigns@yahoo.com with your name and mailing address and you all get a free design! Just go back in and read the Pickle Barrel comments under that heading and it tells you the same thing...Happy Stitching!

Happy First Day of Autumn!

It's a sunny, blue day here and we are happy to embrace this new season - crispy leaves, cool weather, deep blue sky and it just puts you into the mood for stitching!!!! And we know that is always a good thing indeed! Keep checking back as I will be posting pics of some new designs that I am releasing in the coming weeks.

CONTEST: I am giving away a wonderful gift package of a TON of Pickle Barrel Designs patterns along with a couple of kits with threads - how do I enter, you ask? Just spread the word about my blog to your friendly fellow stitching pals then once they sign up to my Blog you post a comment telling me who your referral person was and at the start of October I will notify the lucky winner and their referral friend who joined up that they have won!!!

Sneak Peek! New Christmas Design! Title anyone???

Here is a quick peek at a new Christmas design that is currently being framed out by The Craft Gallery in Findlay, Ohio - the problem is I don't have any creative names for a title so if you have a suggestion just leave me a comment and let me know - if the winning title comes from one of you I will send you the chart for free!!!

Just Cross Stitch 2012 Christmas Ornament Issue now available!

And my "Christmas Eve" ornament is on the front cover right smack in the middle prominently displayed - I am so darn excited to be part of this wonderful magazine and I have always been so excited every year to see what special ornaments would be in it and this time I am part of the group of designers - just flip to page 92 and there is my Christmas story and picture along with the design on page 93 not to mention that the other designer sharing page 93 is none other than Lizzie Kate!