Finished Stitch #3: "Ludacris/Dora the Explorer" Stitch

I LOVE rap music.  I'd love to make hip hop based stitches like Wu Stitch some day, though obviously I'm coming along in the designing department.

Recently I decided to try my best at a first hip hop stitch, and had a few choices.  One was a lyric from Kanye West's "Monster," with a bunch of pictures of monsters around the outside of the lyrics.  But that's a TON of images, so I decided to go with something more basic with Ludacris' "Number One Spot."

My lyric of choice was "Explorin' like Dora, these Swipers can't swipe me."  It encapsulates a random TV show I watched a bit as a youth with a great rappers song, and I always really liked the lyric, so I figured it was worth doing.  So ONTO THE blue pen it was!

This one was tricky...my first two things were just images, and this one had words.  So I traced Dora's head in the top left, Swiper in the bottom right, and lyrics in the middle-ish.  After a week, it looked like this:

My wife's store has a monthly sip n' stitch, and I mostly worked on this there.  But I was working on other stuff for a bit.  Finally, like two months ago, I started marking some headway.  First I finished the top:

I thought Dora looked really good, though I wish I had done another outline of her face.  The writing...meh.  I should've made it more script based, but I kind of just winged it.  And it looks kinda weird.

Here's the bottom and Swiper:

The words suffer from the same ails of the above image, but I think Swiper looks pretty great!  Aside from his not being finished-ness and one eye.  In terms of not being finished, when I traced the image I tried to make it so it'd stop at the edge of the hoop.  But when I stitched it all, that didn't really work.  So I wish I had finished him rather than having some incomplete pieces.

As for the eye, I had a lot of knots, so my back was a mess!  See below:

That being said in the end it wasn't all bad.  The text is definitely a little off, and there's a lot of white space, but I think Luda would be proud:

This is the biggest piece I've done to date, and it makes me either want to follow stricter patterns for embroidery or switch to cross stitch for a bit.  I guess we'll see what's next!