This is a cross stitch piece I did for my partner in the Douglas Adams swap. It's a quote from the very first Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy book. The main character, Arthur Dent, is about to have his house demolished against his will and the guy who wants to demolish his house (to make way for a bypass) tells him that the plans have been on display for a very long time and that he could have lodge a complaint then, and that now it was too late. This is the conversation Arthur has with the man:
"I eventually had to go down to the cellar..."
"That's the display department."
"...with a torch"
"the lights had probably gone"
"so had the stairs"
"well you found the notice didn't you?"
"Yes. The plans were on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet, stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard"
(source:
Wikiquote)
Picture!
It's made of 2056 stitches. 1632 stitches for the letters and 424 stitches for the green ornaments.
At first I tried to make it look very "bureaucratic" with big square black letters on a white background and a cheap frame. But then I didn't think it looked very good. So I added the green flourishes. THEN, my next problem (because there is always another problem!
) was that I cut the Aida fabric too small for the frame (I only measured once, shame on me...), so I sewed it on a plain black cotton fabric with decorative stitches. Of course, I should have done that after I washed it because the stitches didn't hold!
But it's OK now! And my partner liked it!
I don't know how much time it took me to do everything. I only counted the hours for the green ornaments and they took me 4½ hours to stitch. Am I a slow stitcher or what? Is it supposed to take that long??
Anyways, the letters are from this website:
http://www.freepatternsonline.com/xscharts/page/abc19.htm
But I doubled them so they would take up more space. So every square on this pattern was four stitches on mine.
The flourishes are from the "Subversive Cross Stitch" book by Julie Jackson. I don't own the book, I only took the pattern for the "
Search inside" feature from Amazon. Again I doubled it up, so it would take more space.
I have the pattern I made in Excel format if anyone's interested.
