Little Lulu

I have a friend who loves Little Lulu. You have to be of a certain age to remember the comic book character, but she was beloved by many little girls at one time. My friend believes she even looks like Lulu. She has long, dark, naturally curly hair that tends to hang in corkscrew curls, but I think that's really where the resemblance ends. For quite a while, I've wanted to stitch her something Lulu-related, but apparently that character has not been licensed by the x-stitch pros. So I bit the bullet and adapted a drawing myself. My method is just to trace the design onto tracing paper and then tape it to graph paper printed with the same number of squares per inch as my fabric. Instant chart! Here's the result with plenty of back-stitching to help get the shapes right. She's stitched on 25-ct Vikki linen. I used some DMC color variations for the dress so the color wouldn't be so 'flat'. And that ice cream cone is from the skein of pink Princess floss that I won a while back. I think I'll make it into a little bag of some kind with some cute backing fabric I found today.



I received a lovely surprise gift from Kirsten. It's a luminary made out of card stock with a cross-stitch design. You just put a tea light (battery-powered for safety!) inside. This is so cool, but so difficult to photograph. This photo is showing the light from the lamp behind it. There is no light inside yet. Kirsten used an opalescent fabric so it's really sparkly. And it folds flat so it can be mailed like a greeting card. You can see better photos on Kirsten's blog, the 10-16 entry.