Portlandia Cross Stitch

One of my favourite women in the world shares my birthday (well, I share hers, she claimed it about six years before me). Last year I cross stitched her some Portlandia inspired craft for her birthday gift, using patterns from subversive cross stitch:

They took a few months and I learned some important cross stitch lessons. First, 3 strands of floss is ideal, while 4 gives a great full look, it's too thick and gets tangled and requires re-threading far too frequently. The other important lesson was NEVER try to work with the prettiest, sparkly DMC floss *death to sparkly floss!*

While working on these I also learned about needle threaders *happy magic music* I don't know how it could be that as I enter my third year of cross stitching I'm only learning about the threader now (in fact, I didn't know what it was in sewing kits and used to throw them out!). Life changed. 

Went with 2 red and 2 yellow strands of floss for the bird

Completely changed the colours to ones I/Laura would like, including mutli coloured floss to give the contents of the jar that little bit more authentic pickled look. The border in the pattern is grander but I made it sparkly and blue and could not hack one single stitch more in that vile fraying floss.

For readers who don't get just how awesome I am ;)I give you the two clips from Portlandia oft quoted in our homes, which the above cross stitches reference:

And the most appropriate Portlandia clip for a blog about craft LOLZ: