WIP - Huggles Featherweight Birth Sampler

In contrast to the last birth announcement I worked on, I was able to zoom through this latest one in a matter of a week. This was largely thanks to a renewed fervour for cross stitching combined with the leisure of time afforded by maternity leave. I'm painfully aware that this will probably be the last time for several years where I will have so much free time available to devote to my own hobby.

The work remains a WIP because the little girl in question is also a WIP and due to be born in early January. By then I will have my own newborn to wrangle with and so I've tried to make life easier by just leaving myself with the task of filling in the name, weight and date of birth. Oh, and the framing (I need to go online and purchase some more framing supplies and a custom made frame).

This was a Bothy Threads kit and incredibly user friendly. They really are my favourite kits out there. The printed pattern is a great size - so much easier on the eye (especially compared to dimension gold kits, one of which is my current project) and I like how they produce a pattern for cross stitching and a separate pattern for the outlining. 

The colours were also lovely for this piece and the brown backstitching produced a lovely effect, I think black would have been too harsh.

You can see what a difference the backstitching made:

Finish - Noah's Animals by Dimensions

By the time 2015 is done, I will not have too many finished cross stitches to my name, but I will know that I spent three quarters of my year on the demanding, exciting and draining project of growing my firstborn child. 

The nausea of morning sickness drove away my stitching bug and even after it faded, I was often too tired after work to stitch, or I would begin to feel car sick when I attempted it. I could stitch for about ten minutes at a time before giving up.

This is what I love about stitching though. Those ten minute increments added up and even though progress was slow, I built something out of a small amount of sustained effort over a period of about eight months. The finished product never belies the amount of time involved.

Here is the end result! "Noah's Animals" by Dimensions. 

The pattern came with water at the bottom of the ark, but I didn't like the way it looked and decided to go with a waterless background.

It was a really bright, colourful pattern and demanded a lot of colour change throughout. I wasn't very inspired by the blobs I was creating until I got to the back stitching stage, which is when things began to pop.

There were enough French knots to keep me interested but not so many that I grew sick of them.

All in all this is one project I will look back on and see so much more effort in it than I imagine anyone else will! It wasn't a complicated piece but it was my most challenging.

I'm also stoked to say that since I started maternity leave a few days ago, I haven't been able to stop stitching. I'm so excited to spend the next (hopefully) four weeks with a needle in my hand working on my next project.