I recently finished the “Spring Snapperland” cross-stitch project by Bent Creek. Several years ago, I purchased the kit and pattern from Shepherd’s Bush, and they sent me the patterns, buttons, snaps, fabric, and embroidery floss.
Here is an overview of the project.
The floss used in this pattern is “overdyed” floss, meaning it’s not uniform, and can change. In fact, one end of the floss might be darker than the other end. Also, if you buy another skein of floss, it might be a completely different set of colors! Because the colors for the house and the tree overlapping it were too close, I ripped that part out and redid it with different colors from the same section, and it looks a lot better.
I am working on a blog post with suggestions on how to use this type of floss. Here, I used both Week’s Dye Works and The Gentle Art overdyed floss, which are two of the brands I use the most.
Here’s the back of my project.
And, the project after I stretched it and squared it up. I will make a blog post on how I do this.
Spring Snapperland is at the framer’s now. I hope it frames up beautifully! I’ll update this post with the fully finished photo, once I get it back from the framer.
Lessons Learned
Some things I learned from this project:
- Make sure you start with the right weave setup in your linen. I think mine was wrong, and I had to do a lot of special work to get it to turn out nice.
- When the fabric is very open, like this one, every little thing shows up between the holes, so it’s not a good idea to drag floss behind empty spaces. Start and end one-block Xs in the same block. I used a loop start and then took the floss under the stitches twice.