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.
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