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.