Project Recap [Monarch butterfly]

Next up on the cross stitch project list was a smaller pattern with a short list of colors, another request from a Cornell friend. There were 7 colors total, 2 of which were black (310) and white (blanc) that I already had, and I picked up the remaining 5 colors for this monarch butterfly by Gentle Feather (Etsy) during my Michaels field trip.

Monarch butterfly

I stitched the pattern on 14 count light blue Aida leftover from my turtle and whale. At its widest and tallest, it’s 87 stitches by 61 stitches, or 6.2” x 4.35”. Mine turned out 6.25” wide and 4.25” tall (before washing), so every project I’ve checked has had its dimensions be somewhat off. At this point, I’m not sure if the Aida is very slightly off or if I stitch in a slightly uneven way that distorts the Aida. Anyway, the circumscribing rectangle contains over 5,300 stitches, but the pattern wasn’t full coverage and I’d estimate the actual stitch count to be closer to ~3,500 stitches. Time to completion was about three weeks, for an average of a little over 160 stitches per day, but this was done during my most intensive thesis writing phase so I was stitching less consistently.

Out of all the patterns I’ve done so far, I think this one had the most jumping around between colors and could have benefited from gridding, which I did not do. I completed the black and brown outlines of the wings first and then filled in the rest of the colors from dark to light. I did end up skipping a square on the right wing that I eventually discovered when the wing didn’t meet up correctly with the center section, but I blame that on stitching while simultaneously waiting for/arguing with my internet connection when I was trying to watch Cornell Thanksgiving weekend hockey (I eventually had to give up on the Wi-Fi and go sit next to the router with an ethernet cable plugged in). Because of the symmetry of this pattern, I did go back and do a lot of unstitching and restitching to get the wing outline correct instead of trying to adapt the rest of the pattern to a missing column.

Unfortunately, this pattern was not the most well designed. (Also note that it’s not perfectly symmetrical, but that may not be a major concern to anyone but your friendly neighborhood lepidopterist.) There was no one page version, which is fine since people stitching from electronic devices is a fairly recent development, but the two page version doesn’t have any overlap squares (usually shaded in grey to help transitioning between pages), making it difficult, particularly if you haven’t gridded, to move between pages if you don’t want to cut off your stitching right at the page line. I had printed the black and white version of the pattern to bring along on my Upper Peninsula trip in case I needed something nonelectronic to do, and I ended up taping it together and using it as an additional reference while also consulting a pdf in color.

The color pdf was okay to read, but symbol choices made the black and white version harder to read than it could have been. Although there were only 7 colors, 4 of the symbols were triangles, including right triangles in the bottom right and bottom left corners, one of which could be shaded or unshaded (see the symbol key below), and the two unshaded triangles were often right next to each other. I’ve also heard that darker colors should have symbols with heavier visual weights. This pattern had black as an unshaded diamond and white as a solid triangle. Admittedly, my stitching style caused some of the difficulties with the 2 page pattern, and the symbol problem was mostly solved by using the color version. In the end, I like the final result, and I definitely wouldn’t blacklist this designer or anything else that extreme, but depending on the complexity of the pattern, I might look for other options.

Symbol key