Cross Stitch Family Portraits
I've been a long time fan of making gifts for friends and family whenever I can. It's always more creative and interesting to me to dream up something out of the box, perfect for the person, and then it's par for the course for me to get in way over my head and end up spending the entire holiday season crafting it!
Today's project - a Cross Stitch Family Portrait - is no exception. This particular portrait was created for my husband Gus's family. If you're counting (which I'm sure you must be by now) - that's 2 parents and 7 kiddos! Gus is the third of this amazing quasi-sports team and the rest are all officially my siblings this year. Continuing in the tradition of making them meaningful gifts for Christmas (like a family-themed monopoly-style board game), I wanted to pull together something truly great.
So after reading a particularly captivating Martha Stewart article on cross-stitch portraits, I set to work! I thought for sure this would take me an afternoon- maybe two.
W-r-o-n-g, wrong.
More like a month and a half - on and off. See, if I had been any good at math, I would have realized that one square = one stitch, each person = approximately 250 stitches, times 9 people... and yeah, should have seen this one coming! That was like 2200+ stitches. Oy. Each figure equals about a few hours of work in reality. Regardless of how sore my hands ended up, this turned out pretty sweet and I was very proud to finish it, with minutes before Gus had to leave for the airport to go see his family for the holidays.
I invite you to visit this Martha Stewart article for the directions which I followed exactly. This makes a great gift and I'd highly recommend tackling it, especially if your family is a wee bit smaller than ours.
What's the craziest or most elaborate gift you've ever made for the holidays? Leave a comment and let us know! Or take a stab at the guessing game below.
Hint: The cross stitch is in order of age (oldest to youngest) and my husband looks pretty cute miniaturized in blue.