The new improved cat in a tutu

A couple of items of background:

1. In most of my incarnations on the internet, I use this avatar:
[album 128913 FutureCat.jpg]
I first found it in the avatar collection of a forum I occasionally visit under another guise (so I won’t mention the name of it here), so I’ve got no idea where it came from originally, but I’ve become quite attached to my little cat in a tutu over the years, and it’s sort of become a part of my internet persona.

2. Apart from Bookcrossing (yes, I do have a life apart from Bookcrossing, though it sometimes seems otherwise), one of my other hobbies/obsessions is cross-stitch embroidery – especially large, over-ambitious projects. I’ve even got a computer program that coverts images into cross-stitch patterns.

Can you see where this is going? Yep, a while back I thought it would be fun to cross-stitch my little cat in a tutu. And now, about 6 months, 12,900 tiny stitches (I used a very fine fabric (32 count, for those who know what that means) so the design could be very detailed without being too big), and 188 colours later:

[album 128913 embrcat1.jpg]

I’m quite impressed with my efforts 🙂

I’m not sure exactly what I’m going to do with it now that it’s finished (I can’t afford to get it properly framed at the moment, and I don’t really like making embroidery up into practical things), but I’ve swapped my old profile picture on my Bookcrossing bookshelf for the embroidered version (is it just me, or is there something a bit weird about taking a jpeg, converting it to cross-stitch, and then taking a photo of the cross-stitch to convert it back to a jpeg again…)

Currently reading: Slammerkin by Emma Donoghue

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2 Comments

  1. 188 colours! I’m seriously impressed!

    The cat looks lovely. I embroidered two peacocks a few years ago, one the mirror image of the other. Then I did a birds-in-fruit-tree to go between them. I have ideas of making them into a panel to go above the four-poster bedhead, but no progress has been made, and they’re part of my pile of unfinished projects.

  2. Thanks, Kimi. The 188 colours was pure greed on my part – the picture would probably have looked just as good with half that number, but I wanted to test the limits of the computer program (as well as provide myself with a challenge – over-ambitious, like I said 🙂 ).

    The peacocks sound nice (peacocks always make a good subject for embroidery – I’ve got one waiting to be started, once I finish off a couple of other projects…) – I’d love to see a photo.

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