Kittens in Mugs Who Ate my Thread

After the dramas with my last cross-stitch, the Rose of Love, I found these cute kittens to be relatively easy. The stitching was all straight forward and the aida was very easy to work with, if a little stiff.

The one major whoopsadaisy I had with this pattern was an insufficient length of thread for one of the colours included with the kit. It was a cream colour and when I reached a point where I had 6 stitches to go and only 5cm of thread left I knew I was cutting things a bit fine. Somehow I managed to complete these 6 stitches by constantly rethreading the needle. It was labour-intensive, time consuming and a pain in the butt. But I got it done.

I went over the pattern again to see if I had wasted any large quantities of thread anywhere, but to my eye I hadn’t. I’m still confused as to how close it was; I guess I was functioning under the naïve assumption that kits would always supply me with a surplus of thread. My mistake. That should have been the end of the matter, except it wasn’t.

As I was nearing the end of the pattern I found that I had missed a single stitch in this cream colour that I had now run out of. I panicked. Now I realize that a clever person would at this point take a break, head into town and just buy some more of the colour. Unfortunately I’m either, depending upon your point of view, too lazy or too stubborn to do this. So I had to get creative. I unthreaded about 1.5cm of the same colour from the back of some stitching and began the unbelievably fiddly task of putting in this one stitch.

It would have been 500 times easier to just use a different colour and no-one would have been any the wiser, EXCEPT that I would have known. Sometimes these sorts of things don’t bother me at all and sometimes they eat away at my brain until I have fix them to the way they should be. As it happens, due to the excessive amount of handling this small piece of cotton was exposed to, it became off-coloured anyway. I’m surprised it didn’t burst into flames given the heated glares of hatred it was exposed to.

The element of this pattern that struck me the most was the incredible change that the back stitch made to the appearance of the pattern. These kittens turned from colourful blobs to detailed faces with expressions and appeal.

My one disappointment with the pattern (and it is very minor) is that the left mug which is supposed to be decorated with hearts just looks like it’s decorated with red triangles. In the example picture that came with the kit they are clearly hearts. Yet I followed the pattern exactly and ended up with triangles. Oh well, I guess if I had wanted to undo a LOT a stitches and waste a lot of thread and time I could have altered the pattern.

I figure once it’s finished, it’s finished. Onward and upward.

The Bloody Neverending Rose of Love

This beautiful Rose of Love cross-stitch is definitely a project that I completed in fits and starts. The pattern is from a book of “quick and easy” cross-stitch patterns for greeting cards loaned to me by a friend of mine. Can I just point out that “quick and easy” is most definitely a RELATIVE term.

I started stitching in the centre (as you do) and straight away encountered a bit of a challenge. When stitching the first colour of the rose (I began with the lightest pink) it was very difficult to keep an accurate count of where I was. The stitches follow a broken, uneven spiral sort of shape. As I had no other stitches in place yet and hadn’t put in guide-lines, I found myself constantly going one square too far, or not far enough. Toward the end of that first colour I felt as if I had undone every single stitch at least once in my efforts to be accurate to the pattern. It drove me bloody bonkers.

I would just like to point out that I’m not completely silly though. I am fully aware that there are several things I could have done differently which could have potentially made my life easier. So here are the answers to the questions I know you’re just dying to know:

Why didn’t you stitch in guide-lines?
Well. I have a degree in mathematics and I’m a bit OCD when it comes to numbers and symmetry. I knew that if I put in guidelines I would be constantly recounting and double-checking that they were in the right place. I know I wouldn’t be able to trust myself and all that second-guessing would not encourage a positive attitude to my work.

Why didn’t you just stitch all of the colours in one petal at a time?
The long and the short of it is that I hate starting and finishing threads. It irks me something wicked.

Why didn’t you just count more carefully in the first place?
I tried. I truly did. The stitches were very small. It was HARD.

Once the first colour was in I progressed to the next shade of pink and everything went swimmingly until the flower was complete. At this point I felt as if I had the majority of the project complete so I figured it wouldn’t matter if I took a small break. Nearly a month later I got around to stitching the leaves. A few weeks after that I got the border completed. All that was left now was the backstitch and the dreaded French knots. Sigh.

I attempted to delay the inevitable for as long as possible. I put in all of the backstitch around the rose and even did the vines around the border. In hindsight this was a rather silly idea as I ended up wasting a lot of thread having to put in the French knots separately. A friend gave me a link to a great blog article about how to create French knots and after many failed attempts I finally had a product I wasn’t completely disappointed with.

With that the Rose of Love was finished. I haven’t framed it yet. I’m on the lookout for a nice square frame that will fit and then I thought I might try my hand at some lacing.