Amateur Amalgam

Part 1

July 27, 2024

I’ve had this one for like, a decade at this point. I work on it a bit, then put it away and completely forget it exists, then rediscover it after a few months, and the cycle repeats. At one point I took it to work with me to work on during slow days, and that did keep me consistent with it, but then I had to take it out of my bag and just forgot to ever put it back in.

I got this one while I was walking through Michaels looking for yarn for a now abandoned knitting project, and decided to get it on a whim. The picture of the resulting piece looked really pretty (and it was nice and small) and at the time I thought I had lost another cross stitch piece I was working on (spoiler I did not lose it!). I thought ‘I might as well get this to get me back in the grove of things’

This is supposed to be a pair of poppy flowers overlayed on a poem (at least I think its a poem, I haven’t actually read it). It uses 14 colours of thread, and since this is a kit, they are all provided. I’ve decided to work through this one colour at a time, and I’ve already finished with 4 colours. I added a black border around the edge just so I could see the size of the final piece and know how much room I had to work with. The frame I did not always have, I got that after the third or fourth time I picked up this piece to work on.

As I work on this piece I’ll be updating this post as I go until its finally complete! Hopefully this will help me keep track, and actually work on it!

Part 2

Nov 27, 2024

So. It’s been a while since I picked this up, but I did find my earlier log of when I worked on it. Not the original one mind you, cause I’ve had it for ages and I genuinely cant remember when I actually started on it, only that when I found it again it already had some of it done.

2022 I did a lot of work on the flowers, but I only picked it up a few times.

In 2023 I only worked on it once then I forgot where I put it.

Found it again this year, and I’ve really only started working on it again this past month.

I did manage to finish the flower petals at least. I’m working through it in order of the colours, and I’ve finally made it to the leaves – there are so many leaves 😭

It’s also at this point, where I noticed that I messed up my stitch count for the leaves. Can you tell? No. Am I gonna fix it? No.

Part 3

Jan 14, 2026

I’m done!

I can’t believe I took me this long to finish this piece. I counted the total time and it was only 50 hours – for something that I picked up like once a year for 4 years that is surprisingly short.

I had intended to actually finish and work on this much much more, but partway through I got caught up in other things and just never picked it up again. I did, of course, mess up several times throughout. Can you tell? No.

I actually got the vast majority of it done just after new years – I happened to be off for a few days and decided I might as well give it a shot. From where we last left off I was halfway done with all the leaves, and it was all about filling in the shading to give them a better sense of being 3-dimensional. After that I just needed to get done with the centre of the flowers!

After that it was just going back to outline everything and to the little bits in the centre of each flower with french knots. Mind you I had never done these before and let me tell you – I still can’t. The pattern called for way more than I put in but it just wasn’t working out for me. I need to practice on a blank piece of fabric to try and get them right.

Anyways, after the horrible job I did with that I was done!

Technically, as I was saying above, there is another part to this. A poem is supposed to go over everything but I couldn’t read it so I decided to skip that part and leave it as is.

Dare I show you the back?

It’s not as bad as I thought. I made an active effort to keep it somewhat neat, if not just for the fact that it would waste the least amount of thread.

Since it’s been literal years, I washed the piece before I decided to frame it. The colours around the bottom flower ran a bit, but you can only really see that when looking from below, and it also gives a little glow to it so I’m not mad.

And voila! The complete piece! I actually really like how it turned out, and its soo much brighter in person after it’s bath. The fact that if I had sat and done it I could have finished it within 2 weekends instead of over 4 years is wild.

Let this be a lesson for me to actually do stuff more.