As a gift this embroidery was very well receive, though not without its bittersweet edge, as Svarting was tragically killed by a car less than a month before the holidays. At that time the embroidery was more than halfway done, so I finished it and hoped it could be a nice memory of the cat, rather than just of his kitten days.

The pattern was generated with PC Stitch Pro 9, and was reasonably easy to follow – I’ve since found some methods for attacking large, complicated projects that make stitch-counting a lot less tedious, and make for fewer missed stitches that I have to go back and fill in, and I’ve also thought of some different approaches to the conversion process that I’d like to try, but overall I’d rate this one a success – it’s a good likeness and close enough to photographic, when viewed in person, that my grandmother’s partner refused to believe it was actually stitched.

A custom pet portrait this size, number of colors and level of detail would run about $700 plus shipping, and have a 30-45 day completion time (I could finish it in less but stitching for more than 2-3 hours  day causes me more pain than I’d be willing to bear with). Frame and matting can be added at cost.

If you live in Europe, I whole-heartedly recommend and endorse this vendor! They have an excellent selection (didn’t have the kit I first came looking for, but neither did anyone else, so I suspect that’s more due to it being from last year’s collection or something silly like that), their pricing is more than competitive (last order, I paid less than 300 SEK for four medium-small kits and one set of ziplock baggies for floss storage, including shipping - I’m used to kits being no less than 100 SEK apiece and usually more), and I’ve paid more for domestic S&H than I did for international from these guys.

It doesn’t hurt that in my experience, their delivery is only slightly slower than greased lightning, as well.

I do have some minor issues with the kits, but that’s a manufacturer rather than a vendor thing, so I’ll likely get into that in a future post at some point. (And as the resulting work will be gifts, I’m afraid this post will have to go without an image.)

With an eye to the fact that most of the time that hasn’t been spent on actual paying work lately has been spent bent over my too-high-count Aida weave (tiny stitches are pretty but time-consuming), this magazine caught my attention at our local corner store. I think I picked it up from the stand and turned it over in my hands three times before I finally made up my mind and purchased a copy, mostly convinced by the absolutely gorgeous strawberry pattern on the cover.

The magazine contains a number of patterns and project suggestions for them, with excellent instructions, as well as a short section with an introduction to cross stitching and a new related craft (for this issue, cross-stitching on paper, which DOES look pretty cool). I learned some things, and found some patterns I’ll definitely be up for trying out, including the aforementioned strawberry pattern. Each issue also comes with a small project kit, in this case the materials for a little Royal Guard embroidery with a magnet felt frame, which I’m pretty indifferent about.

The pricing is a bit of a shame – it’s definitely worth the cover price of £3.99, but with import costs, tax, and markups, this ended up with me paying two and a half times that for my copy, and subscriptions actually work out to even more per issue. But I’ll probably still pick up one or two more, because I did enjoy what was in this magazine a lot, and the preview of the next issue contained some very interesting patterns.

Bottom line: Definitely recommended if you’re into cross-stitching!

(Also, to the right you can see a small teaser for my secret Christmas project which is by now well underway…)

I can say that it will entail sewing 12540 cross-stitches, which would average out to just over 90 stitches a day if I were to start today, by Christmas Eve at the latest. Naturally, for a project of this magnitude, with this many colors (49 different colors of floss, some of which I’ll need more than one skein of), I wanted to make sure I found the cheapest supplier I could - DMC floss is many great things, but “cheap” is not really among them.

Some searching lead me to Broderama, which sells its floss at just over half of what my local yarn shop charges (I still like this yarn shop; they’ve got lovely yarns and the woman who runs it is a delight), and which also optionally sells floss in 1 m lengths for whatever colors you don’t need much of. I erred on the side of caution and only ordered the shorter lengths for anything which would require under 100 stitches, so I’ll probably have quite a bit left over once this project is done, but I’d rather do that than run out at an inopportune time.

As a bonus, I made a pretty big, pretty stupid mistake when I specified the amount of Aida weave I’d need, and the woman who runs Broderama took the time to email me and straighten it out instead of going ahead and sending me a uselessly-small piece of fabric. That’s the kind of customer service I, for one, notice and remember!

The core for the headless sculpture (the head couldn’t be finished until the beak dried, as the beak had wool worked into the back of it and was to be felted in) was made in front of the TV one evening. In fact, the entirety of the bullfinch was made in front of the TV, making its way through most of CSI:NY. One of the primary complications in this early stage was keeping the bird out of the cats’ reach.

Once the beak dried, which took somewhere around 48 hours, the finch no longer had to be headless. The beak was sculpted out of an air-drying product called Silk Clay, which has a strange, rubbery texture somewhat resemblant of what bubblegum looks like (I don’t chew gum myself, and touching things that have been in other people’s mouths isn’t really my thing, so I can only guess there). Even when dry it has an ever-so-slight bit of give, and it weighs very little wet or dry; I’d hazard papier mache is actually heavier than this stuff.

The first part of his body to get color was his wings – as a matter of fact I suspect I did the finishing on the wings before the head, but this makes more sense as narration. The wings are fairly thick even before adding the color layer; this guy never was and never will be a realistic bullfinch, just a cutesy stylized one. Adding the color seemed to primarily firm them up, though it did make them noticeably thicker, as well.

The beak was painted with two layers of professional-grade black nail polish before adding color to the body, and the red areas of his body got some shading with a darker red, especially around the cheeks and chin. The area around the beak turned out to eat more wool than I’d expected, since felting it in tended to push it in between the beak and the rest of the head, but eventually, I managed to get it felted in securely.

I actually ended up ripping the white core roving feet off his legs and trimming the legs a little before putting the black on his feet; it was a good idea in theory, but in practise using a core on small fiddly bits probably actually ends up using more wool than just doing it colored from the get-go, and it ends up bulkier. In this photo he’s just pinned together, and doesn’t yet have his eyes, as I didn’t have a thick enough needle at home to take the waxed linen thread for jointing him, nor any beads large enough for his eyes.

All through the construction process, the cats showed plenty of interest in my work, and it ended up being difficult to get photos of the finished product without either getting a cat in the frame or having them snatch the bird entirely.

Finally, another angle of the finished bullfinch. The eyes are 8mm beads sewn into his head; I’m not sure whether they are semi-precious stone beads or glass beads, but I do know they’re not plastic, and they have a wonderful sheen to them that photos do not do justice.

I was lucky on the timing, as I managed to catch them when they were both offering a 20% discount for liking their Facebook page, and free shipping without having to meet the otherwise quite high threshold for that perk.

As they don’t yet have order tracking, I spent about a week being a very twitchy child-on-Christmas-Eve and not knowing when exactly my order would arrive, until I finally got possession of my package today. Like with everything else that enters the house, this big cardboard box had to be carefully vetted by my feline keepers:

Opening the box up, most of the bulk is made up by wool, so despite being pretty huge it wasn’t terribly heavy. The fact that most of it was wool also means I could photograph the contents relatively easily; all that’s underneath the stuff showing in this picture is more wool:

(As a bonus, I got a second package a day later with some stuff I’d not thought to order the first time around. I don’t have photos of this second package, but it was pretty awesome, and apparently boxes that aren’t gallons and gallons of wool go through the mail system a bit faster. Good to know! Much of the stuff from the second box will show up in some projects of mine fairly soon.)

Bottom line

Pros: Quite reasonably priced, wide selection of general crafting materials, they have a paper catalog
Cons: Can only get specific colors of wool in “harmony packs”, no order tracking, international shipping means I have to pick it up at the obnoxiously-inconveniently-located post office

I will likely not make CCHobby my primary supplier of wool, but at the very least when they run free shipping promotions, they are competitively priced, and the big order of wool I made gave me a good base selection that will tide me over for a while. They also do have the advantage that they carry a lot of the little “extras” that I’d otherwise have to hunt around for, in the cases where I want to make critters that aren’t 100% wool.

When I finally found a supplier, it was in the place I’d least expected: Handelsgillet, a supplier for SCA-style enthusiasts who want period supplies when practising their hobby. They sell a wide variety of reproductions, though I was primarily interested in the waxed linen thread and a couple of blocks of extra wax for future use.

Unfortunately, I was unwise enough to leave the parcel on my desk, and one of my cats, who is enough of a thief that I affectionately refer to her as the magpie, thought the wax smelled interesting and mauled it through the bag. (I also ordered a pair of bone dice, because I am a sucker for neat dice.)