Final Finishes of the Year

I've had some time off--I may have mentioned that--and I've been putting things together--which means that I have two final finishes for the year.

All the bits and pieces of the Shady Bower/May Your Hands set from Tricia Nguyen are complete! It's taken years and years, from the time I started the stitching until the final finishing, but it's done.

The four pieces I've finished in the last three days.

The strawberry emery, which has no emery. I've fooled with emery before, and it likes to escape, and it makes a mess, and it's hard to clean up. Since this is strictly decorative, it's just stuffed.

The inside of the needle book.

The inside of the scissors case (like, duh, there are scissors there!)

The inside of the pin pillow book, with a pretty thread winder.

It pretty much took forever to get all this assembled, since I ignored the directions for machine stitching and did them all by hand. In the process, I think I drew enough blood to supply a MASH unit. However, I felt like I had more control over the process, which means that I'll continue to use my hands rather than the sewing machine. And that means that I need to figure in what feels like as much time to assemble the smalls as it did to embroider them.

I also went back and finished the carrying bag for the Merry Cox Sweet Little Blossoms set, so I can call that a finished set, too.

I still have a day and a half before I go back to work to get into some kind of needlework trouble. I believe I'm going to go stash diving and see what floats up.