Pooh in a Teacup

When my youngest daughter was pregnant with her first child she found an animated gif on one of her social media sites. It was a baby pooh in a teacup with a tea bag swinging back and forth that said Relax. It had a floating heart going up from the cup.  She said “if it is a girl I want you to make a cross stitch pattern of this for me”.

 Well, it was a boy and I didn’t think his Daddy would like me to make anything so pink for his strong boy. So the idea sat on bake for awhile. A year later she was pregnant again. This time, yes, with a beautiful baby girl. I have written before, she was very anxious to join our little family, to the point where she was only 2.5 lbs when she was born.

I sort of forgot about my daughter’s request with all the excitement of a new granddaughter. I was cleaning off my smartphone one day, as you have to do for more storage space when you take so many photos of grandchildren, and  I came across the animated image. This was before I was really on pinterest or instagram so it never occurred to me that it was highly possible I may be reinventing the wheel by creating my own design.

I took the image and proceeded to create an elaborate cross stitch design. The design wasn’t too bad but it needed work. I cleaned up lines, added back-stitching, but found out if I tried to reduce the 200 colors I lost a large amount of detail, shading and depth that the original picture contained. Being the wonderful Granna that I am, I kept most of the original color, 198 colors to be exact.  51 just in Pooh’s nose. But look at that nose!!!!! I continued trying to shrink it down and each time it lost something in the translation. I finally decided to keep the stitch count high but I didn’t want a 22×36 photo so I took a different route. I purchase a piece of 38 count polka dot fabric with sparkles from Stoney Creek. 1 strand of thread throughout over 1 square and started to stitch. It was  287×297 stitches. It took me a little over a year and at least part of my eyesight but I finally got it to look just like I had hoped. My goal was to have it look more like a picture than a cross stitch & she loves it!!

 

We purchased the “Hello Gorgeous” sign and attached a HUGE flower to it to make a collage that her mom can hang on the wall.  I made her the barrette holder at an earlier date and the goal was to have everything come to together so it would all match. My daughter and granddaughter are pleased and the collection now hangs above her bed.