My sister sends me care packages a lot. It was about time I returned the favor. So I made her a penguin princess bag!She has recently developed a fascination with penguins, and has always loved the color purple. And she's always been a bit of a bag lady, which is okay because I am too. Also in the care package were a Valentine's Day Pez dispenser, a fat quarter of Christmas fabric, and a fat quarter of Rosie the Riveter fabric. I forgot to take pictures of it all before I sent it off. Sorry about that.
This piece was stitched directly on a pre-made black canvas bag using 14 count waste canvas. Finished size is only like 2" square. Waste canvas is made with a very loose weave such that you can pull the strands out of the work after its complete. I also designed the pattern for this one from a clip art image pulled off the web. Let's just say I learned a lot in this process.
- Stitching on a pre-made bag is hard! I had to work it upside down with my hands inside the bag. It made for very slow going.
- Canvas is really hard on the fingers. It's such a dense sturdy fabric, pushing the needle through the material was not very comfortable.
- Waste canvas doesn't pull apart as easy as they say. Only a couple of the threads pulled out like it was supposed to. I had to trim the rest with itty-bitty scissors around the edges of the piece.
- Use small sized graph paper when creating a design from a piece of clip art. I used 1/4" graph paper, and even with the clip art blown up real large, the pattern did not transfer well to the graph paper.
- Cross stitch design software is a pain in the butt. Its designed to start from an image, then automatically translate it onto a graph and allow you to adjust the colors, lines, scale, etc. The software I originally used was really picky and picked up every variation in color pixel by pixel. It became so tedious, I scrapped it and went to the graph paper.
So it was a pain in the butt to make, but she loves it. That makes it all worth it.
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