Gingerbread Man Needlebook

Gingerbread Man Needlebook — officially Gingerbread Man Sewing Book — by Stacy Nash, taught as her class at The Jingle Ball 2025 (Sunday, December 7, 2025). Same fold-open needlebook with a wool pocket inside concept as the Gingerbread House Needlebook class she taught the year before, but this one is shaped like a gingerbread man instead of a house — two stitched panels, mostly worked as white outline beading around the silhouette with the figure left as unstitched linen, so the fabric itself reads as the gingerbread.

The two panels:

• Front: smiling gingerbread man, full face — cheeks, two button eyes, big red smile. A holly-and-berry collar at the neck, a small decorated Christmas tree held in one hand, a red-and-white candy cane in the other. Two white icing buttons down the centre.
• Back: the same silhouette from behind — no face, just the back of the head. Same holly collar at the neck, but instead of tree-and-candy a small red-and-green plaid patch-pocket sits across the middle with a bouquet of winter twigs, berries, and a single sprig of mistletoe sticking up out of it. Signed TT 25 at the lower right.

I substituted the kit fabric for what was in my stash — the original kit ships with 36ct Blackberry Primitives Linen Hot Cocoa, but I used 32ct Opalescent Gingerbread Belfast Linen, a similar warm gingerbread tone but with a fine glitter / opalescent shimmer worked into the fibres that catches the light all across the empty space of the figures. DMC in place of the kit’s Weeks Dye Works.

Learned my lesson from last year’s House — I finished the cross-stitching almost a month before the class this time, with breathing room. And then never assembled it. Different failure mode, same end state: another little stitched gingerbread waiting to be made into an actual book.

Started November 2, 2025. Cross-stitching finished November 9, 2025 — eight days.