The last time I blogged about Leopard’s Gaze was over a year ago, in September 2016. There was a reason for this – and it’s not that I wasn’t working on it! The project was destined as a birthday present for my brother, and I don’t know whether or not he reads my blog…I didn’t want to blog about it and ruin the fact that I’d finished it! The worst case scenario was that he knew I was working on it, but thought it was never going to get finished, and if he didn’t read the blog, well, I was trying to cover my bases.

If you didn’t get it from all of that, Leopard’s Gaze is finished!

Leopard’s Gaze – the inspiration

In December 2012, my family and I went on holiday to Zambia. While we were there, my brother took the most incredible photograph of a mother leopard. Her name was Alice, and she had a couple of cubs with her. We spent a magical hour or so watching them snooze in the sun before leaving them to carry on. We came away with this photo:

At the time I was working in Hobbycraft, and one of the Dimensions Gold Collection kits, Leopard’s Gaze, came in. It was almost a no-brainer. The kit came home with me.

The original artwork for this kit is a painting called “Light Being” by an American wildlife artist, Al Agnew. It can be found here.

Completing Leopard’s Gaze

Since January 2013, I’ve moved house five times, and the project has moved with me. It’s travelled from Kent to Devon to London to Devon to Bristol, and had stitches put into it (more in some places, less in others) all along the way. Things really kicked off when we moved to Bristol. We arrived in June last year, and didn’t get any of our stuff until October. This meant that I only had the few projects I’d brought with me when we first arrived, and Leopard’s Gaze was one of them.

I got really into it. The job kicked my butt for the first few months – I hadn’t been in a corporate environment before, and it’s always hard being the new person, so I had a lot of spare time in the evenings! Before long I was steaming ahead, and I finished stitching on the 18th of February this year.

I’d decided to get it professionally framed – it had taken me four years to make and it needed someone who knew what they were doing. I washed it when I was done, and it warped pretty spectacularly, so it was a big job. It was framed at a place in Bristol, and after a demonstration, I chose to put Art Glass in the frame. This is specially coated glass that doesn’t reflect light as much as regular glass – in the below photo, the clarity of the centre of the pane comes from the Art Glass.

My brother’s birthday was in September this year. It was a big birthday, so we had a bit of a party, and I presented the leopard to him with something of a time-lapse. I filmed his reaction, which you can watch here.

No more Leopard’s Gaze

Our bedroom wall, which homed the leopard for four months, has seemed bare ever since it went to its new home. However, I’m so pleased I’ve managed to finish and present it to him, despite the fact that I miss it. I’m hoping it will be an heirloom.

The project got me back into cross stitch, which I got started on when I was about 13 and hadn’t really looked at since. I found out about FlossTube, the cross stitch community on YouTube. I learned a lot of new techniques and also got exposed to a world that I’d never known existed. It was a bit of an eye-opener!

If you like the project and are into cross stitch, I’m doing a giveaway for the pattern and remaining floss. The kit is extremely hard to get hold of now, but I never intend to stitch it again and want to give the pattern to someone who will appreciate it! The giveaway is open until the 30th of November 2017, so you still have a couple of weeks to enter for it. Head over to my YouTube channel and this video, which is where I’m holding the giveaway, if you want to have a go.

Life has been a bit emptier since this enormous project got finished. However, I’ve got plenty on the go and a resolution to finish all my WIPs, which you can read about in my last blog. I’ve got more FOs to tell you about from 2017, so watch this space!

Much love,

Corrie xx

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