My Only Finished Stitch to Date - Embroidered Coach McGuirk (and the beauty of the blue pen!)

Now, I begin this blog without having finished a lot of pieces.  I've stitched a few pieces of my wife's (she's The Hoop and Needle/Purple Hippo Stitches, a Cincinnati based brick and mortar cross stitch and embroidery shop) for her to sell at shows, and I've finished a few little samples as I taught various children/adults the basics of cross stitch and embroidery.  I also have a few works in progress (WIP). 

But as of the creation of this blog, I have done my own cross stitch or embroidery intended for myself or as a gift for another on ONE occasion.  Obviously I'm hoping to up that number as this blog continues, but this post is about my one finished piece, which features H. Jon Benjamin (who you may better know as Archer or Bob on Bob's Burgers) in his best all time role:

I always suggested cool stitches to my wife, but she always had so many other things to do and suggested I try doing it myself.  Originally I only knew Cross stitch, and the idea of making my own pattern on graph paper or in Mac Stitch frankly terrified me.  But then I learned Embroidery, and it all became possible - thanks to the power of the Blue pen.

Now for those of you that have never seen one of these - it is amazing.  You just draw whatever you want to stitch onto the linen you're using, and then stitch over it.  At the end, wash your fabric in water (hot or cold, doesn't matter), and the blue pen goes away.

Yeah, it's incredible.

So I found a nice picture of Coach McGuirk to shoot for and printed it out - ended up using this one:

Traced it with my trusty blue pen, and then stitched over the blue pen using the above image for a guess on colors.  Though, to be fair, I had my wife's floss wall at her store to help me pick colors.  It's every color of DMC floss all in one place.  Here's a bad picture of it from when we moved to our bigger and better location:

After all that tracing and color matching, I stitched and ended up with this:

It's mostly backstitch, with a little bit of satin stitch on the soccer ball.  My wife has tried to get me to use some other stitches - and some day I will - but on my first piece I was happy with this.  The colors seem right, and I like what I ended up with.  So all's well that ends well!