A Good Friend Once Told Me

That cross stitching, it's a simple thing, you thread a needle:





You bring your needle up through this hole:





And down through that hole:



A very simple thing.

It has become apparent to me over the last week that cross stitching is not simple, at least when you move into the 40ct linen and silk thread league. Until recently I was never that stitcher. I was a DMC and overdyed cotton kind of girl on nothing higher than 36ct. But my love for Primitive Needle's Ichabod Seabury pulled me to the dark side. And dark it is.

I couldn't see the holes in the linen and my eyes aren't that bad. Reading glasses even at the lowest magnification made the fabric even blurrier to my eyes, so I felt my way along on this project. It's full of stitching mistakes. Chock full of them I tell you.

But because misery loves company I'm going to have a contest right here on this old blog. I left one glaring, huge, major, big time mistake in this piece, the kind of mistake that will make stitchers say to themselves, "can you believe she left that mistake in there, can you believe it, seriously?" and "can you believe she admitted to it?". I ripped it out and restitched four times before saying, "I give up, in you stay". So in the next couple of days I'm going to take a really good, freshly ironed picture of my darling Ichabod and let you find my Amish mistake. Once you find it, you can email me and all the correct responses will be put in a bowl or hat and drawn from and the winner will recieve my gently used Ichabod Seabury chart and cut of PTP 40ct Swamp linen on which to stitch your very own Ichabod. And I just looked at my chart and gently used is correct, I wrote the dimensions for 36ct linen on the back, whoops. Well at least if you decide to go up to 36ct I've done the math for you.

This is a very simple stitch, I just decided to make it harder on myself by attempting 40ct for the first time with a darkish linen.

The Picture This Plus Swamp is a wonderful funky green and I love it. All my stitching mishaps with this project were my fault, bad lighting, not the linen, I love, love, love Picture This Plus fabrics and definitely not the fault of the chart. It was all me, myself and I.

So stay tuned for The Amish Mistake contest to pop here in the next couple of days. I'd have posted a better picture today but this is one of those days when I have to be 20 places at the same time, I hate those days.

So see my quick snap of a completely finished Ichabod Seabury below:

Ichabod Seabury

The Primitive Needle

40ct Swamp linen

Belle Soie Floss

And stay tuned for The Amish Mistake contest!

Also, any guesses from what movie I ripped off my title and the first few lines with some creative license by me?