Christmas on Gingerbread Lane!

FINALLY!

I've been dying to share with you guys this project for months now!

I think I've mentioned this before but we had a bunch of ideas/plans for this winter. We wanted to do a winter sampler (and we still might in January!) and we wanted to do something traditional Christmas and something very fresh and bright Christmas.

For fresh & bright, we picked a palette of hot pink, aqua, pale blue and a good Christmas-y red. I begged Ashleigh to do something sweet themed and we came up with a neighborhood of gingerbread houses! I *love* anything house/home themed. I have a good collection of house fabric, I have prints of houses from artist friends, I just am big into houses.

And houses covered in sugar? Count me in! Ashleigh literally went to town (lol, I crack myself up!) designing this pattern. She made each house (there are three!) chubby and filled with gum drops, icing and then the little creatures...

Oh.my.gosh. Ok: PENGUIN. GINGERBREAD MAN. CUTE SNOW GIRLS. ALL ICE SKATING. One hint...wait till you see the snowman in the third part. Yup. Snowman.

So we made a list of our favorite winter activities. Drinking hot cocoa, snowball fights and ice skating. We put them all in this pattern. And then when we made the list we got to thinking about driving around town and seeing decorated houses. Each house is decorated differently and the top of each house has something special happening too. We knew we also wanted to make it a countdown to Christmas so if people wanted a cute Advent Calendar, they could have one but if it was left out, the design would still be awesome.

A million bits of and details all in one pattern but we honestly had no clue how to present it! Most of our mystery patterns have a chart to work on at first, like frames or a lace-y border. This one was tricky! We thought about sending the scalloped countdown border but it's low in the pattern, I was concerned first time stitchers would have a hard time counting the stitches down to start. Then we thought: what about all the houses at once? But that is a LOT of stitching all at once and again, there are a lot of things above and below the houses that need space around them. We didn't want people to be intimidated!

Then one afternoon it randomly hit us. Duh. Start in the middle! Do one house at a time with the scalloped border and numbers given to everyone in the first week to help make counting easier! SO! When the pattern launched at midnight, people received the chart for what you see above and for the next two weeks they'll receive the rest of the homes in the neighborhood! Awesome!

I'm not sure if I told you guys this before but we've been wanting to expand the patterns. They now have two page stitch guides with both illustrations and photos. And we really wanted to make the charts more beginner friendly so they now have a black and white symbol chart AND symbols on color squares! Two full big separate charts, both broken up in half so you can print and tape big versions together AND a full one page chart. It's 13 pages. 13 pages! Like a little book! It's so cool and we hired some great proofers who have given us amazing suggestions on how to make things easier for everyone. I'm really pleased about how much we've learned and grown this year.

I'm going to share with you for the next two Friday's how the project progresses, it's been inspiring to me to watch podcasts and read blogs where you get to watch something grow each week. I feel like I'm cheering people on as they work on things.

If you want to stitch up your own gingerbread lane, you can find the pattern here!

A few FAQs I get asked often:

$14.95 is a one time fee for the full pattern!

You can print from home, your local copy shop and the patterns are compatible on ipads/phones/kindles. If it can open a pdf, it will open our patterns.

The pattern is automatically sent to your paypal email address after paypal receives confirmation, so there is no waiting for anything in the mail!

One more thing. I finally finished a pair of socks but I've been wearing them since I finished them, I'm going to reblock them today so I can share them with you this weekend!