Wednesday 19 June 2024

The Little Mermaid, a.k.a. Giant Ariel

I can`t tell you how excited I am about Hachette Partworks` news that`s just landed in every Disney Cross Stitch Magazine subscribers` inbox: the massive Ariel stitching I worked on 3 years ago is finally available to purchase (and for a pittance too - perks of being a subscriber)! 🤩 


Now, before you could say, "£49.99 is not what I call pittance", I agree; for a lot of us, it is a lot of money to spend on ourselves when everything is getting so expensive, but I look at it this way: knowing the size of kits that retail for around £50, you get at least 4 times the threads and fabric with this one, and if you consider how many days/weeks/months you`ll be spending working on this, what`s a few pence per day to pay for something that brings you joy, as I`m sure it will to every Little Mermaid fan out there. 😉


And I`m not kidding when I say you kinda have to be a fan: I worked on this giant piece - designed by the wonderful Durene Jones - between January and May 2021, for a total of 62 days (as you can see in my pic below, I was also stitching, among other things, the Princesses sampler for the Disney XS magazine at the time). In other words, it took me 2 months, stitching 7 days a week, 6-8 hours per day.


When the stitching pack arrived, it was overwhelming for a moment as I had never seen a piece of aida this size before (but then it turned out it was for other projects as well, so I cut it in half), and just as well, because it covered not only my stitchy chair but most of the living room too! 😂


After chopping my fabric to a more manageable size (!) - about 70 x 100 cm, the size of one of those massive IKEA frames for posters...? Yeah, that one. But don`t worry, the design itself is "only" 46 x 76 cm (😳) - have I mentioned this kit was HUGE? 🤣 So after sorting the fabric and my 80-odd (!) skeins of thread, I sellotaped the twenty-one A4 pages of the chart together (see above), which I needed for the backstitch detail that I added on the go, whenever I could, but the majority of this had to be left till the very end because e.g. the grid of the map sits on top of everything else.


In the end, Giant Ariel with her over 100,000 stitches took me almost 400 hours to finish: 395 hours to be precise, 336 of which was the cross stitch, and a whopping 59 hours of backstitch at the end. As I mentioned before, it measures cca. 46 x 76 cm - the above photo probably doesn`t convey fully how large it is, so here`s a photo of my son holding the fabric:


And last but not least, I have a video for your viewing pleasure: I made a mini film by stringing together the screenshots I took every day after I finished stitching. These are not of the actual fabric, because that would have been cumbersome to unclip and roll out every time, so instead, I took a photo of my daily progress in Pattern Keeper. Enjoy watching the birth of this piece that was a real joy to stitch (as something this size is bound to be because it has everything from small details to large areas in just a few colours where you can `rest` after tackling busier places), so I hope a lot of people will decide to give it a go - happy stitching! 😊



Sunday 16 June 2024

WOXS 348 and Peter Rabbit "Autumn"

It`s been another busy week in my wee stitchy corner: the latest issue of The World of Cross Stitching is out, with the Emma Congdon card that I stitched (7 or 8 months ago ...? 😳) as the magazine`s free gift, and I`ve also managed to remember to take close-ups of my latest Peter Rabbit finish, the Autumn sampler, yay! 🥳 Hope you`re all having fun with your current projects too, happy stitching! 😊













Thursday 9 May 2024

7 years, 9 Disney samplers, 1 picture

Just a very brief post as the title says it all: this image from Hachette Partworks came up today in my FB news feed, and it made me happy to see the fruits of my labour since 2017 in one photo. This is from the company`s post announcing the launch of the final, 9th sampler - the Lion King one -, and after I finish the last characters` step-by-steps, it`ll be the end of an era for sure. *sigh* Luckily, there`s Peter Rabbit to console me... 😉



Friday 12 April 2024

the last year and a bit - WOXS, Disney, Pixar, and now Peter Rabbit

It`s been over a year since I last wrote here and now that I`ve checked my last post, even that was added after a long hiatus - little did I know back then how busy life would become, even though the job I took on was only part-time. Of course, even just a few hours a day (plus commute) add up, and since on top of work-work, I`ve been diligently stitching away "as normal" - while trying to run a house and spend time with DH and DS as well -, social media en masse moved to the back burner. However, I`ve got loads of pics that have piled up in the meantime, so let`s see what`s "new"! 😊
In the case of the World of Cross Stitching magazine, I have to go back as far as issue 331 - after the giraffe in 229 and Popcorn Bear in 330, this cute bunny (designed by Fiona Baker) was the magazine`s free gift:


The following month, in issue 332, I had two mini hoops, a ladybird and a bee (designed by Durene Jones), and in issue 333 an adorable stitching mouse by Lucie Heaton.



After these, there was a bigger gap till issues 340 (snowman "cone"), 342 (cute Margaret Sherry hedgie), and 343 (Elmer). 😍





As for my stitchings in the Hachette Partworks magazines, I think the last sampler I posted pictures of here was the Winnie-the-Pooh themed one. Since then there has been one based on Pixar movies, and more recently, another sampler with a Lion King theme.





















Phew, these were quite numerous - if you`ve scrolled this far, well done and thank you! 😉 Once the samplers are done, I also "re"stitch each of these characters one step/colour at a time, but I won`t bore you with hundreds of these pics as well... especially as there`s much more interesting news: Hachette Partworks recently launched a new XS magazine, so after Disney, now we have Peter Rabbit too! 😍🐰 The base of this series is the set of 4 seasonal samplers that, similarly to the Disney samplers, were designed by Durene Jones, and stitched by yours truly. 
 


After I finished the Spring one, I was in such a rush that I forgot to take individual photos of each character, so I only have the sampler pic and a group photo of the 15 steps of the central motif. For the Summer sampler, though, I`ve got the wee ones as well, so here are some MORE photos, lol, because you can never have enough piccies of cute bunnies 😍 Thanks for visiting and I hope to be back sooner than this time next year - happy stitching! 😊