Today I finished my Snow Leopard cross-stitch.  I placed the final stitch of blue on Thursday night, and today I finished the back-stitch outlining.  The cat looks a lot better with his whiskers!  They are almost as long as Whiskey Loopy’s.

Below is an animated GIF showing the difference that the outlining makes.  Give it a few seconds to load.

The finished Snow Leopard cross-stitch measures over 200 stitches by 180 stitches, which is 15″ by 12″ when stitched over two threads on 28 count linen.  Rich did a double-take when he saw the finished product.  He says this one is one of my best!  High praise indeed. :)

I’m considering entering this in our company’s Arts in April contest.  Given that I bought the materials with last year’s prize money, it would seem appropriate.

I think my next project will be one of my custom designs.  I use the PCStitch program to convert my images to cross-stitch patterns.  Sometimes it can be challenging to find images that lend themselves well to cross-stitch.  Often the color schemes just don’t work, or there is too much detail that gets lost in the conversion to stitches.  I think I might try one of my Fractalized images next.  I think the colors and lines of those might make a cool cross-stitch.  So stay tuned on the blog for my next project…and for photography!  I can’t wait for the weather to cooperate and let me get back out to shoot.