2015 Festival of Trees donation

Every year the Riverside Children's Theatre in Vero Beach has a Festival of Trees weekend of activities as a fundraiser the weekend before Thanksgiving. Needle Nicely has participated for more than ten years.  In the early years of our participation, we pattern-stitched ornaments and then finished them "in-house" to keep costs down.  The first year we participated, our tree was the first to sell at the full asking price.  What an honor!  Our donations have varied over the years.  This year we are donating 4 needlepoint purses.

The first has an admittedly limited audience since it has a W on both sides of its barrel shape.  Still, it is so attractive I have hopes someone will fall in love with it.  Trubey designed it for herself years ago.

The next purse is one that I had a wonderful time blog-stitching in the early days of this blog. It's a Stitch-Its design.   As a shop model it has been a dud (that is, it hasn't sold one similarly-shaped canvas for finishing in this style), so I feel no pain parting with it.  I just love the flowers and its smaller tote-size.

I stitched this purse about twenty years ago from a free chart.  Now I'm not even sure that the chart was heart-shaped.  It utilizes watercolors and utilizes fun stitches.  I've always enjoyed looking at it.
Buy this to give to your valentine?

The last, but not least, purse is one that took me over six years to stitch.  It contains squares stitched in basketweave utilizing all of the colors of Kreinik's ombre.  It took me that long to stitch because I was working on it during the years when Needle Nicely left its Florida shop open for the summer months while it reopened its shop in Blowing Rock, NC.  Every summer I completely unpacked the shop inventory I had transported in a U-Haul trailer.  However, my belongings usually stayed in suitcases.  This canvas was misplaced (lost) several times for a period of two years one time.  I think it was worth all the trouble.