This year’s crazy pants cross stitch project: a full coverage extravanganza of my favorite Waterhouse painting, Boreas. (The study of which is a frequent avatar of mine.)
I had to stock up on an insane amount of floss. And I may break down and get myself a way better frame – the piece of fabric I’m working with is enormous. It’s 42 pages of charts. I’m very interested to see how long this takes me to finish.
So I started this back in – checks notes – 2015. I had picked it up once in the meantime. Definitely pre-Covid. Maybe 2018? But having recently completed a few cross stitch projects, I felt like I needed to just get it done. And once I got back on the horse again, I knocked it out in about a week.
So, lessons learned. I still really hate French knots. I think I’ll always hate French knots. When they don’t look very good, it drives me crazy, and they often need to look good to make the overall pattern look good.
I think I like working with cotton floss better than wool thread. (This is pretty much the opposite of how I feel about my preferred knitting fiber.)
I am really glad I finished it. I’m not sure I’ll be in a hurry to do more. I like how much better cross stitch looks, with less effort. But I’m sure I’ll be tempted back eventually – doing complicated stitches is really fun when it works. I just need to convince someone to do French knot-less designs.
Coffee Admirers is done. I definitely still hate French knots. (And I totally cheated and used Colonial knots.) Back stitching wasn’t too bad, though I did take a break in the middle of it to power through some knitting, because it is definitely more boring than the cross stitch sections.
I guess this spells the end of my Russian pattern obsession, for at least a bit. I definitely have no feelings of ill will towards the designers themselves, but that’s something I won’t be comfortable looking at for a while.
The actual cross stitching for Coffee Admirers is done – there’s a fair amount of back stitching to go, and I do get a kick out how much that makes a difference in a back stitch heavy pattern. (Heck, I got a kick out of how much taking a picture worked to up the contrast – it’s amazing how much more everything blends together in person.)
I get the biggest kick out of how big this pattern is compared to the actual product. The translation of the name of this is Coffee Admirers. I suspect it’s losing something in the translation from Russian. (It’s really not the best translation, but I don’t say that to cast shade. It’s a really well done pattern, and I’m really glad they spent the money on the graphics. The little bits of English are good enough to get the job done.)
First craft project of the year is done! This is Owl Forest’s Fly Agarics. It’s a fun project. Looking back at the picture on the site, the one big difference is that it’s designed to use some hand dyed variegated floss. I like the substitution colors that were given, but that variegation does look pretty cool. However, I do not have the time or Cyrillic alphabet skills necessary to track down that level of specialty product from Russia, so I will not mourn its loss too long.
Things just look so much better when you’re stitching on fabric that actually shows off the main contrasting color!
This is the Fly Agarics pattern from Owl Forest (furthering my current obsession with Russian designers). It’s nice to have a stitching project going again – I was leaning pretty heavily into the knitting to see what I could get done before the end of the year.
So here’s the danger of just blindly using fabric because you have it and you figure, why buy more? Do you see the Ecru colored stitches in amongst the top of those orange stitches? Of course you don’t – Ecru is pretty much the same color as the fabric! And those really need to be contrasting stitches. So I need to remember to pay more attention to that when selecting fabric.
Needless to say, this has been set aside until I get some fabric in a better contrasting color.
Here are the two Punochka cross stitch patterns, completed. The second one is called Mushroom Umbrellas. I do have them both in the frames I was trying to fill, but the light this time of year is not conducive to taking good pictures of glass without ridiculous reflections. So someday I’ll get a picture once I manage to set up my embroidery gallery wall.
I have two small square frames that I used to have sun and moon cross stitches I’d done a while ago in. I decided I’d really like to refresh those, so I found two patterns I liked in the Punochka shop in Etsy. This is the Halloween Moth.
I’m doing the other pattern on the same piece of fabric, since they’re so small, so no final pictures until they’re both done.
And can I say, the internet is amazing for cross stitch. I first learned back in the late 80s or early 90s, so I was stuck with what I could find at the local chain craft stores. It’s like an embarrassment of riches out there now. I’m obsessed with Russian designers – I just love their aesthetic, and I can easily buy PDF patterns from them, and even pay in rubles through Paypal. My 40-something self has to occasionally step back and marvel at the things my teenage self could never imagine.
The North Wind and the Sea 