watching chubby Taras grow

So far this year I’ve been busy working on many Frosted Pumpkin Stitchery projects (no change from 2015 here 😀), but after months and months of selecting colours, waiting for good daylight to do so, using the right length & variegation, etc. I felt the need to transition to some easy breezy solid stitching for a while.

Don’t get me wrong, I still love had dyed needlework madly, but one can have too much even of the best things (read too much chocolate during the Easter holidays) 😜.

It wasn’t hard to choose a project involving solid DMCs from my list (after all, that’s the upside of having a WIP/KUP for every kind of stitching/season/etc. 😉), so I put Cute Kitty back on my frame and had a real good time with it.

A little recap for those of you who were not around a year ago when I started this, or for those who forgot (and that’s only fair considering how much I have going on at all times!).

I started this piece last May after spotting it finished by another stitcher, Carla Eldridge, who posted a picture of her finish during one of Jo‘s blog hops. It reminded me immediately of my cat, Taras, but with a much wider waistline 😜, so I renamed the project Chubby Taras but its actually name is Cute Kitty and it was designed by Margaret Sherry for the magazine The World of Cross Stitching issue #188.

Once I saw Carla’s stitching I hunted it down straight away and I was lucky enough to find a local shop that still had this issue in stock, so I grabbed it together with the two DMC threads I was missing (there’s always that odd skein one has to buy no matter how giant the stash, uh?), a piece of plain Zweigart linen – and off I was! 😀

I worked on it as far as completing the cat and started on the flower bunch (a miserable length of green, nothing more really), and then I got distracted by some other piece and let  this darling one linger on the dowels for almost a year.

Well, enough is enough, so with further ado here is a collection of work in progress shots I kept after each day of stitching so that you can watch it grow 😊; it seems rather silly now that I’m almost done with it to show the entire progress series, but let’s be honest, for some crazy reason stitchers love watching progress shots! 😀

This last one was taken yesterday, with any luck I’ll be done with the actual stitching by tomorrow (a bunch of daisies and white on white ahead, but I have series 5 of Downton Abbey to keep me company!) and then I’ll finally be able to start on the backstitching, which as anyone familiar with Margaret Sherry designs knows, is A LOT. That being said, I should be able to cross this one off the list by the end of the week, just in time for a WIPorn re-start that has been sitting there for about 6 years, imagine that! 😀

I forgot to mention in the recap, this is Cute Kitty exactly as Margaret Sherry charted it: same DMC colours, same fabric colour, no change in stitch types, placements, etc. – the only liberty I took was to use a high count of linen (40ct., as usual) instead of the big holes they usually go for in magazines. I find it looks even cuter and much more detailed this way; once I took the magazine out to check on a few things, I noticed that the picture on the cover wasn’t even half as cute as the WIP I had in front of me – but then again that’s another weird thing about needlework: the model on the cover hardly ever does justice to the actual stitching. 😱

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I hope you had a lovely Easter weekend! See you soon!

Lots of love and happy xxx,

Chiara