I swear this piece is/was cursed. I can see some little old lady witch dancing naked in the moonlight with this kit on her alter cursing it before gifting it to her rival all the while cackling internally. (Yes I know witches aren't really like that but I love the imagery) Almost anything that could go wrong with this piece did. Even blogging about it is torture! It's freaking tiny so I was NOT going let it win.
Fun issues encountered while cross stitching;
1) I spilt coffee on it... twice. Fortunately a bit of diluted bleach and a cotton bud fixed it up nicely.
2) I miss counted the stem - realised too late to really fix so just worked around that one.
3) I had to frog the bottom left hand leaf THREE times! It has something like 40 stitches. 40 stitch in almost a square. I swore at it so so much when I did this and threw it in the bottom of a bag. It took months before I was willing to look at it again.
4) left it folded in the same place for too long and now have a probably permanent fold line straight through the middle and along one edge. Ironing got rid or a lot of the crease but it's still visible at the edges.
5) missed a few random stitches and had to come back to them - not a great mistake but annoying none the less.
6) I had to unpick the pink border twice. Got three quarters of the way around and realised the stitching wasn't going to meet. Had missed one stitch in the upper right corner. Unpick, try again. Missed a stitch in the lower right corner... third try was the charm.
I also decided to stitch the pink border all around in half stitches then go around again for the full cross stitch; This didn't really work the way I'd hoped due to the fact the whole border wasn't made up of full cross stitches. On the first round I did all the half stitches so when stitching the other way around at every half stitch point you see on the front at the back I've had to stretch the thread over two or three lines. Not optimal stitching and the back is a mess. If I'd left the half stitches to the second go round it would have worked significantly better. Hindsight.
The only bit that went right was the word 'oregano' which turned out quite nice.
Further issues encountered while trying to turn it into a sachet;
1) I hadn't really intended to turn it into a sachet in the beginning so I did the stitching as per usual, starting from the middle of the aida. Turns out that if you want enough aida for the sachet you needed to start from the corner around 2.5cm from the edge. Found this out after I spent several good minutes fiddling with the finished cross stitch trying to work out how turn is into a sachet before giving up and reading the instructions. Another lesson in reading ALL the instructions before starting.
2) could not find the right aida to use for the other half of the sachet. I needed 14 count aida to finish the stitching up as a sachet. I have plenty of random bits of 18 count adia, 14 count aida...in cream, black aida and various evenweave fabrics. No 14 count. I had to buy some especially for this... I'm sure I had some, I guess now I have more.
3) decided to hand stitch it... I hate hand stitching so I really have no idea why I thought that was a good idea. I feel like I stitch like a deranged 2year old. The inside is really rough, though it does mostly look okay on the outside.
The measurements of this little cursed piece is something like 10cm x 15cm for the whole sachet and 9.5cm x 11cm for the design.
I have two other similar kits to do... I don't think I'll be picking them up any-time soon. Also I'd take better photos in the daylight BUT it's done and I'm done. I really have nothing left for this piece. I'll put some pot-pourri in it and throw it in a draw and that will be that.
No comments:
Post a Comment