Thomas Kinkade Cross Stitch

Soooo, yet again I have been dreadful with updating this blog. I was stupidly busy with stitching over Christmas and time just slipped away. I'm working on a pretty big blackwork commission at the moment in quite a short time frame so not much free time for blogging I'm afraid. Hopefully will get the chance to update this blog with all my latest pieces and show the amazing crafty bits I got for Christmas at some point soon. Having a brief sewing break for half hour so thought I'd do a quick blog about one of the Christmas present I made this year. My Mum is a huge fan of the painter Thomas Kinkade and she has wanted one of his pieces of artwork for years and years. I've been meaning to stitch her up a Kinkade piece for a while now and this Christmas I finally got around to doing one :) I found the kit for 'Evening Glow' on ebay. I had been searching for a kit I liked for weeks and finally found this one.

It was a printed canvas kit, so the picture was already on the aida material. It came with a chart, which gave a pattern for how you could embellish the picture with a variety of cross stitch, half stitch and back stitch using 1, 2 or 3 strands of thread to create a more 3d feel.

The great thing amount this chart was that you could add as many or as few embellishments as you wanted. I decided to pretty much stick exactly to the pattern on the chart, and once I had completed that, I added bits that I thought would make the piece stand out a bit more. This was really fun as I could just stitch what I wanted as I went along. I also stitched the artists signature into the corner.

The kit came with a load of blending filament. This was thread that I had never used before and I have to admit I was a bit apprehensive amount using it, as I have never really been found of using metallic threads. This turned out to be totally different to what I was expecting. It was much smoother than metallic threads, and although when you came to the end of the length of thread you were stitching with it was starting to fray slightly, for the most part it was incredibly easy to stitch with and gave a fabulous sparkly result. I would definitely use it over metallic thread in other projects that I wanted to add a bit of sparkle to.

Apologies for the rubbish phone camera picture, but this is the only shot of it I have were you can see just how sparkly the blending filament made it :) I had great fun stitching it up, and couldn't wait for Mum to unwrap it on Christmas day :) Thanks for reading, Vicki x