One of my favorite early designs of Santa with an armful of little Jester dolls in the woods packing his bags with help from his forest friends under a stand of gnarled bark trees. This is one of my limited custom designed Christmas Stockings on 18 mesh canvas, this one based on my original Santa's Little Fools (Jesters) canvas.

It's a very festive design of bright colors and many painted details including bright bits of decorations on the snowy covered tree branches.

It was a challenge to re-create this figure, the trees and bag of toys into a stocking format. For a short time I was stumped wondering how to balance the scene with the stocking toe as well as regrouping the tree branches along with the scale of the original painting. It was not just a matter of retracing the design into the stocking shape but balancing all the design elements and color placements.

Using my scanner and computer, I rescaled the original outline of the design and redrew everything so all would balance.

Then created the new toe scene of the Rabbits with bag of toys, balancing the colors with a few more scattered packages, another Rabbit figure and added other design elements to balance the whole picture. I wouldn't have minded keeping this design for myself!

I can just imagine what an interesting stitching experience this will be to create the gnarled bark of the trees with different textured threads to contrast with the sparkly snow clinging to some of the branches along with using more textured threads for Santa's robes and many more for the Rabbits and other details. Needlepointing a design like this would only be limited by one's imagination.

The most fun part is how each person who needlepoints a design like this will often come up with a different version based on his or her own imagination!

Needlepoint is one of the most creative forms of individual stitching a stitcher can work with. For many of us needlepoint designers, it's a pleasure to see the individual interpretations and results of such creativity based on the original canvases.

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