The Den of Slack

My childhood best friend Michelle had her second baby in December. For her first child, I cross stitched an Animal ABC afghan from a Dimensions kit. I liked stitching the afghan and wanted to do another one for the new baby, but after much searching I couldn’t find a cross stitch design that I liked as much as that one. Everything I found was very wholesome and cutesy (not in a good way).

There seemed to be more options in stamped cross stitch, which I’d never done before. I’ve always had the (snobbish?) impression that it’s easier and less elegant than counted cross stitch, but I decided to try it.

Bucilla’s ABC Baby kit caught my eye first. Still resistant to doing stamped cross stitch, I thought I could use the chart to stitch it on afghan fabric instead.

But I soon learned that the charts for stamped cross stitch aren’t on a grid, which would be challenging to cross stitch, and the line art like the elephant would be impossible.

I tried charting a couple of letters using the kit chart as a guide, but wasn’t happy with the results. I also decided that even though this blanket is for a different baby, the new blanket should be something other than the alphabet.

(Also, I didn’t notice until after I bought it that “hippopotamus” is misspelled in the product shot! It’s spelled correctly in the kit I got, so Bucilla corrected this at some point, but I saw a complaint about it in a user review, so it seems there are still “hippotamus” kits in circulation. Awkward.)

So I tossed that kit in the closet and went back to Google. That’s when I came across this 2009 post about two Mary Engelbreit Mother Goose kits from Bucilla. The one on the left is a 45″ x 45″ lap quilt, and the one on the right is a 34″ x 43″ crib cover. (Click the picture for a bigger version.)

The fact that the blog post was dated 2009 and I was embarking on this project in 2020 was foreboding, but you can find anything on the internet, right? I searched around and did find the crib cover on the Plaid website (Bucilla’s parent company) as well as a few other vendors. But I couldn’t find the lap quilt anywhere, and that’s the one I really wanted. I liked the composition of the design better, and the inclusion of more characters.

It was already late July and the baby was due in December, so I decided to buy the smaller one. I set up a saved search on eBay and was prepared to start over if the lap quilt turned up soon after I’d started.

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