So yesterday was the party for Marissa (recipient of my first stuffed block), and instead of 'no one' coming, as her frantic mother told me on the phone on Thursday, there were 4 other couples, the grandparents, parents, and 6 other children. I felt more than a little bit annoyed that we cancelled our other Saturday plans to attend. But what I want to talk about today is giving cross stitch projects as gifts. Do many of you out there do it? I would really appreciate your comments.

We've recently seen a spate of birthdays and births and I've been stitching lots of gifts for the little people. However, I've discovered that I seem to have a hard time "letting go." LOL. I try to make the gifts as perfect as my imperfect talents allow, and to make them very personal. So it tends to bother me when the recipients appear to shrug the gift off. At yesterday's party for example, no one even acknowledged that it was a handmade gift. The grandparents kept asking what she was supposed to do with a stuffed block, like I'd given her a pet armadillo or something equally bizarre. The birthday girl promptly threw it into the wet grass and no one made any attempt to rescue the poor thing from the spilled drinks and debris. Another recent gift was "stripped down" and the parts used for other purposes.

I understand that when you give a gift, that's it. It's theirs. But I'm wondering if anyone else has had the feeling that maybe they should've just blown 20 bucks at Toy-R-Us instead. Or if you give the gift with some sort of introduction that makes it a little clearer that this was a labor of love and you hope it will be received in the spirit in which it's been given.

Like I mentioned, I would really appreciate any & all comments you have. Thanks, and happy stitching to everyone for the remainder of this weekend. I'm going to be working on "Sweet Dreams" again, which is also a birth gift.

Today's picture is Four Fat Friends, a freebie from The Drawn Thread. If mine looks radically different than other versions you've seen of this chart, it's because I didn't follow the directions for colors and I mixed in one-over-one and two-over-two stitches for variety and I used different types of fibers for texture. It was a fun stitch!