Friday Finishes #21: Met My Dad?

I had a hard time deciding whether or not to make this a Friday Finishes or a Salvaged Stash article… I technically finished it but 95% of the work wasn’t mine. This was a UFO started by my mother before I was even born and she was only fifty or so stitches away from finishing it… so I finished it for her and then framed it myself. So I guess it’s both a Friday Finishes AND a Salvaged Stash. I might end up doing another article for it as a Salvaged Stash piece, but for now I’ll just stick with Friday Finishes!

Name of Piece: Great Dane – I’ve always called it “Met My Dad.”

Designed by: Mary Ellen Yanich for Canterbury Designs

This chart was distributed in Book 71 of Canterbury Designs: Man’s Best Friend, Collection One. The booklet is copyrighted 1990. Here is a picture in case you want to look for the booklet yourself:

Kit Contains: This was a chart and not a kit. (You can tell I didn’t originally start this based on that alone!) As far as I can tell my mom stitched this on 14 ct. Beige Aida (like the instructions said).

Finished Size:  Roughly 10 in. by 10 in. is my guess. (The chart itself doesn’t say.)

The Story: I found this piece in a stack of my mother’s UFOs when I was about 17. She gave me all of her stitching stuff to go through at that point as she hadn’t stitched herself since I was born. A lot of her pieces had only just been started or weren’t quite half done – all but this one. I didn’t take a picture of how far along she got. I should have. It was almost finished! I don’t really know how many stitches she had left but it couldn’t have been more than 50. When I asked her why she hadn’t finished it, she didn’t really have an answer. So I decided to take an afternoon and finish it for her!

Time To Complete: 45 minutes, at the longest. There really weren’t many stitches left!

Review: The chart itself wasn’t at all difficult to follow, but this was my first lesson in finishing someone else’s stitching. It had been 17 years since the piece had been touched, so my mom didn’t remember much about where she left off or how she’d stitched it. I very quickly realized that she had done things very differently to myself: she had used all six strands in the embroidery floss for her stitches. All six of them! She said she liked the coverage. The chart itself only called for three strands. I myself prefer two on 14 ct. Aida. But all six strands? I had a hard time even threading the needle with that many.

The other trouble I had was that the area I had left to stitch was pretty small, but my mother hadn’t marked her chart except for a couple very lightly shaded spots here and there. I had no indication what spot she had left to do. I tried counting on the chart and then find it on the piece, but either I counted wrong or my mom had counted wrong while she was stitching; I could never get the symbols and colors to match up on the chart in the same spots as the ones already on the piece. In the end, I had to give up and follow the chart as best I could. The part left was just shading on the leg; if it didn’t match up exactly with the cover model no one would notice.

And so, after less than an hour of stitching, the 18 year old UFO was complete!

And here it is washed, ironed, and framed (albeit rather poorly by a 17-year-old me):

Final Verdict: This was an exercise in completely someone else’s UFO. I’m glad it’s finally finished after all these years! My mom can now display it on her walls with the rest of her finished pieces. 🙂

Have you done this chart before? How did it go for you? How did you like it, or not like it, as the case may be?  Leave a comment below or head on over to our Facebook page and tell us how it went!

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Friday Finishes is a segment where I catalog and review all the cross-stitch pieces I have ever completed. Some of the pieces I no longer have information on, or I don’t have pictures because I gave away the piece as a gift and forgot to take a picture, but I’ll do my best to be as informative as possible! Check back on Fridays for more.

By the way – to keep up on Little Thread Crafts stitching news and get pictures, updates, and more that don’t appear on the blog until much later, follow me on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram! I would greatly appreciate it!