A new chapter in cross stitch

Last month I put the final stitches on a giant, super detailed cross stitch design I started over 3 years ago. It felt like the end of an era! Since I was in my early 20s I've had some kind of large cross stitch kit on the go constantly, and I tend to put at least a few stitches on it at the end of every evening to relax and wind down. It's what I do to relax. This particular kit is called 'A study of birds' and I came across it by chance in a craft shop, reduced because it's an older kit.


Here it is!

If you know me you can probably tell what especially appealed to me about this naturalist's college-style design! (Though no collecting eggs of course, you can still see them in scientific collections.)


This was my first kit that used linen for the background rather than the larger weave, easier to navigate aida. Consequently the kit employed some interesting techniques that took a while to get used to. The very detailed areas (the row of eggs and bird heads) used stitches a quarter of the size of the rest, and only one embroidery thread at a time rather than two like for the normal sized stitches. That seemed simple enough, but if I had read the instructions more carefully I would have noticed that the background areas around the images were also supposed to be one thread instead of two, even though they were normal sized stitches! This was indicated by having two different symbols for threads of the same colour, and was meant to make the images stand out more clearly. I didn't take in this part of the instructions and was confused to find I seemed to be running out of certain colours very quickly. That's what prompted me to read the instructions again, realise my error and start doing it the way intended. You can see the line between two thread and one thread stitches in the blue area on the left of the main bird image and in the yellow below the egg on the left. Oops! Still, I kind of like it in a way, no one else has a version of this set quite like mine.


I've taken this thing around with me for years, and the once pristine thread holders and pattern pages ended up looking like this:

 

For some of the pages where the design went over a seam, the paper was so worn I had to do some careful figuring out of what stitch went where at times! Also the thread holders became a bit of a disaster.

So, where next? Late last year, as it was becoming clear that I would finish my cross stitch fairly soon, I decided it was time to look for a new one. The 'study of birds' design had some nice 'you can also get these' examples of other kits on it including an absolutely gorgeous one in the vein of this one but with butterflies instead. I fell in love with it, and began scouring the internet to see if I could find it for sale somewhere. I had the kit number and hoped that would help, but it's also an old design and presumably long discontinued. I had no luck finding it at all. When my mum asked me what I'd like for Christmas I told her about the butterfly kit and how I hadn't been able to find it anywhere, and said while I would really, really love that kit for Christmas I understood she'd be very unlikely to be able to find it, and any other kit would be fine. But...she only went and did it!! I have absolutely no idea what secret method she used, but she did it. I was overjoyed.

So many new and fresh colours! I put my first stitches to my new kit in May 2019 (at the centre of the red cross).

 

Onwards to a new chapter!