Crafty Monday: WoCroStiMo Pieces

I've wanted to make this post for about 2 weeks, but I've been waiting until I could post both of the pieces to flickr and then share here. This is the official last post for WoCroStiMo (at least for this year). I wrote most of the post on the 30th and have had it saved, so I'm just going to post what I've got along with some new commentary.

Yesterday was the last day of November and for many people it signaled the end of NaNoWriMo. For me, it was the end of WoCroStiMo, World Cross Stitching Month. If you saw my TTMT post yesterday, you’ll know that I was a “winner” (I met my goal) for the month! My goal was 15,000 stitches, and I’m happy to report that I actually had a total of 16,056!! I did two different projects during the month.

The first project was my swap piece for the Phat Quarter Swap. I finished it early Sunday morning and mailed yesterday, so my partner hasn’t received it yet (and probably won’t for another week and a half or more since the package is going overseas). That piece is the one I’m most proud of. I’ve done a lot of other pieces really like but this one I loved and I was sad to part with it. If I had an extra ninety bajillion hours I would actually consider making another one.

The theme of the swap was OMG! The Horror! and I had a chance to combine the awesomeness of a Peeves (from Harry Potter) quote and the iconic movie cover of Poltergeist. I was a bit ambitious, but once I had the idea I couldn't let it go! The completed stitch was 13430 stitches (not including all of the back stitching) and was done on 22ct fabric using 21 different colors.






The next piece came to me as a sort of favor/commission on Wednesday the 24th. The original plan was to work on my giant cross stitch of d00m for the remaining 2k stitches, but this other project fell into my lap at just the right time. I was contacted by Julie Jackson of Subversive Cross Stitch, Jamie Chalmers known in the stitchy community as Mr X Stitch, and the incredibly awesome Bridget aka Beefranck to stitch a "royal wedding memorabilia on the occasion of Prince William’s engagement" (blatantly stolen from the SCS site because my brain sucks right now).

I tried something totally new for this piece, and that was to dye my fabric. I usually stitch on 18 or 22ct fabric and my color options are pretty limited (always white, basically). Rather than try to find royal blue 22ct anywhere, I got some dye and did it myself. It turned out beautifully with only a couple of weird dye spots, and I am definitely going to dye fabric in the future. Of course, I had way too many issues while stitching but I fought through it and was able to do all 2626 stitches in two evenings.



and because I'm insanely proud of the back


The pattern for this stitch can be found on the Subversive Cross Stitch website. It's a pretty big project and I have no idea how I managed to do it all so quickly.

But yes, a very delayed post on something that ended two weeks ago, but I hope you think it was worth the wait!