I was really happy with how the PodPost Patch came out. A design at that small size was easy and fast to stitch, a nice break from stitching endless background on the boxcar alligator. And it was fun to send as a present!

So I thought I’d stitch up Kenn Munk’s “Two griffins, rampant, with a barcode” design, that you can see in the header of his blog. This one started out promising, as you can see from the pattern:

…but then things started going badly. I stitched the banner above the barcode too wide, and had to rip out lots of stitches. Then I ran out of pearl cotton, only to discover that size three pearl cotton is hard to find. So I started over again on a fresh canvas, this time with wool. The griffins stitched up really fast, and I decided to try a checkerboard background, to avoid flat-background boredom.

Unfortunately, I think the background was a big mistake:

The end result is… eye-catching. And it has a certain something that I can’t quite define. Well, actually, yes I can define it. It looks like an industrial explosion in a lederhosen factory. Or if an energy-drink manufacturer gave their package designer a creative brief consisting only only of a sheaf of barley, a tour guide of Transylvania, and a massive ceramic beer stein. Maybe the name would be in a heavy Fraktur font, with extra diareses: “Get your umlaut on with SCHLÄMMIN’ SCHNÄPPS!”

I’m sorry for this, Kenn. I kind of feel like the scene in the book where the messenger boy gets mistaken for the absent barber, and the customer falls asleep in the barber’s chair, and the messenger keeps botching the job, getting progressively worse and worse, until the customer wakes up to find that half of his head is completely shaved bald. Except in this case the customer in the chair is Kenn’s art, which is perfectly good art and did not deserve to have its head shaved like this. I think I’ll wait until its hair grows out, and then try again.