Mermaid cross stitch

I finished a mermaid cross stitch!

The pattern is from GuliStitchShop on Etsy. I love how relaxed and chill this mermaid is.

I’m happy with how it turned out, but gosh this was a frustrating pattern for me. 18ct fabric was really not the right choice for this much backstitching and blended stitches. (So much backstitching and blended stitches!) The blending looks great, but it was surprisingly difficult to keep track of on the tail. I love how the bubbles look, but they all had several colours and blends on top of multiple colours of backstitching - oof.

By the way - backstitching is a type of stitch that creates lines, and in cross stitching is usually used to outline objects. (But not always - in this pattern it was also used for the headphone cable.) This pattern had several different colours of backstitch, and different sections used one or two strands - so many lines to keep track of!

Blended stitches are when you use two different colours of floss in the same stitch. It’s great for doing smooth blending like you see in the tail here. For example, you might use red 1 for a section, red 2 for a second section, and a blend of reds 1 and 2 in between, to make the transition between the colours smoother.

Here is is pre-backstitching, for comparison:

I also need to remember that I hate doing lots of small separate objects - despite my best efforts, a lot of the strands are showing through (and there was no way I was going to do all the bubbles separately).

The framing is pretty basic - I know it would look better with some matboard, but it’s already tricky to get the cloth to fit in the very cheap frames I use (this one was $3), and I’d have to do some major workarounds to get a matboard to fit in there as well.

Anyway, it’s done, so I can gradually forget how frustrated it made me and just enjoy looking at it.