Cross Mondays Week #4 Historical Sampler Review

After 4 weeks of working on my cross stitch I thought it was about time I reviewed the kit.  Its brilliant but I'm guessing you want more detail with that!

The first thing I noticed about the kit was that instead of coming in a plastic wallet with a hook to hang it from in shops, it is presented in a gift bag.  Initially I just thought that this looked nice but it has been brilliant.  It comfortably stores the complete kit as well as my hoop, scissors and any other odd bits I throw in there.   The other bonus is that it has a picture of the design on the outside which is really useful for referring to, particularly when I've been doing the border to check how many flowers there are.  As the bag stands up on its own, it means I can just sit it on the table next to me and keep glancing at it.

The instructions which came with the kit are good, there's enough information for a beginner to get started, but not too much to get bogged down in, although perhaps a diagram or two might help.  The pattern itself is easy to follow.  Instead of using squares, dots and triangles as codes for the different colours, they use letters - simple and very easy to follow, it makes me wonder why others don't do this.  The only slight critisism I have of the pattern, is that there's no overlap between sheets.  Other patterns I've used have a 5 square overlap which makes it very easy to move between sheets.  However, they did include a sheet of square paper for you to work out the spacing on the letters which is really useful.

I've already mentioned how they've used letters for the colours and this is transferred to the thread-holders where not only the letters but the colour name and DMC number are printed.  The best bit is that the threads were already hung on the cards in the correct places!  This was brilliant, I can't tell you the time that is spent before you can get going on a project sorting out colours, trying to decide if you are looking at bright green or spring green!

So last week I left you on a bit of a cliff hanger, would the border match when I got back round to the top or not?  I was very impatient to find out and put in quite a few hours this week to find out one way or another!

  

It matched PERFECTLY!!!

So here it is on week 4, a complete (and perfect) border, and I've started filling in at the bottom.  But its still in the same bright green and I'm getting a little bored of it!  I'm also not sure on where I'm going to fit in Little Owl's date of birth.  I keep going back and forth on what to do, and I think I've come to the conclusion that I need to find out how much space I have to fit Little Owl's name into, and then find a font that will fit.  Then, using a complimenting but smaller font, work out how much space I need for her date of birth, and finally find a space on the pattern to make it fit!

Don't expect much progress next week as all of this is going to take some working out!