Original artwork is by my best friend GraniteFire, gift art commissioned by me for the dear DukeWaxeye.

Well, what much can I say? GF whipped up this fantabulously cute bird for me so that I could gift it to Duke. I loved the artwork so much that I decided to convert it into a cross-stitching pattern, asked Magical525 to do a color check for me, and then stitched it up myself to mail to Duke for his birthday. That is a pile of custom there that you don't get just anywhere, folks. What you are witnessing is true friendship collaboration.

Far as pattern making goes, I took a different approach than the 'complicated' patterns I've been doing go, which is to say I didn't want to smother Duke's chirpy in partial stitches and intense color blending. I still ended up with some partial stitches (becauseeeee I cannot help myself) but I think it's limited enough to not take away from my goal, which was to make a pattern that wouldn't intimidate everyone out of the water.

The program I use defaulted to something like 330 colors when I fed GF's art through it because GF uses the most intense color blending around to get his artwork's colors correct but... I mean, come now, nobody wants to stitch that many colors, especially when the end mess is a bunch of blobs that you can only tell is a bird from a distance. So I got to work isolating the colors and determining where I wanted the backstitching to be in opposition with the regular stitching, made sure the fluffy leg feathers were fluffy looking enough, so on, so forth.

Stitching it went about as expected, nothing to really note, I feel successful in my goals to make a pattern everyone can do. SO YOU SHOULD TOTALLY DO IT, I included a pattern version without the monocle too, just click that Etsy link up there. As a side note I basically had to hurl heavy objects at my mom who wanted to steal Duke's birthday present for herself. C'mon, mom.

I hope you love it, frendly neighborhood chirpy! Happy birthday!

Color Total: 35
Size: 4 x 3.5 inches
Time Total: 11 Hours
18 count light blue Aida
This is a custom pattern by me based on GraniteFire's art.

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