Theme-a-licious May Update

Theme-a-licious is hosted by Heather of It's Geek to Me

Each month Heather thinks up a theme for us to stitch to, or in my case, a theme to somehow shoe-horn my existing stitching into, no matter how tenuous the link!

Menagerie May
Is it a zoo in your stack of WIPs? How many projects can you find that include animals or birds? 

Relatively easy this month.  Lots of my projects contain animals or birds in one shape or another.  Let's start at the beginning of the month:

A bird:

The Little Owl Sampler by Knotted Tree Needleart 

from the Just Cross Stitch Hallowe'en Ornie Special 2012.

One re-animated animal:

Franken-Kitty from Carand88

One arachnid and one animal:

Spooky Countdown by Primitive Hare

Three birds:

Twelve Days of Christmas by The Little Stitcher

Edit to add this little animal!!

Squirrel!!

One amphibian:

Noel Blanc by A Mon Ami Pierre

What do you mean, you can't see the amphibian?  There's one huge great frog sitting in the middle of the piece!!

After stitched the border to the left of the reindeer I moved onto this border and reached the bottom of the left hand piece (I started from the same level as the right hand part to give you an idea of how much I stitched).  When I reached the bottom I was about to turn left when I noticed the bottom motif was the wrong size.  Oops, unpick.  Then I noticed that the five times it occurs (ringed in red) it is charted in different sizes!!  Four stitches wide at the top and bottom and five stitches wide for the other three.  Whereas mine were 4,4,4,5,5 which resulted in being one stitch too short at the end.  Unfortunately the corner design at the bottom echoes the corner design at the top so there was no way I could rechart or somehow fudge it.  And believe me, I tried!

So, an hour of frogging and we've got a few evenings of restitching to do.  Bearing in mind I only manage one or two lengths on this an evening it's very frustrating to say the least!  Maybe I'll do it tomorrow afternoon while we're watching our Sunday film.  I really ought to give those little birdies their beaks too.

Finally, don't forget the Summer Postcard Blog Hop.  This year's theme is Gardens, click on the picture of the garden to the top right of the blog for more details.