OhSewCrafty Blog

• Boo Club series by Lizzie Kate (6 patterns)
• Materials: 32 count “Dirty” Zweigart belfast linen, some WDW and GAST, DMC, buttons, and charms
• Size: 5″ x 21″
• Time to stitch: 18 days

Presenting the Boo Club doctored a little bit with spooky charms!  

The pattern(s) are fine, quite simple, each word only took a day or two to complete (3-4 hours), with less 5 or less colors.   I worked the pattern as a monthly SAL with Jo’s Halloween Ornie blog.  However, in November I discovered an error.  The first word, Spooky, was placed correctly with respect to the side borders, but every word below was too far left.  Once I saw the problem, it was glaring, and I had to fix it.  Frogging the border was preferable to frogging the words, so I did… it took a few days to frog and restitch the border.    Now Spooky is too far right but everything else is centered.  I can live with that.  

The materials are as suggested.  Dirty belfast is a nice enough fabric for Halloween stitching, dark enough so that white pops, but it really is a dirty brown and I’m unlikely to choose it again. I found the use of the hand dyed threads rather frustrating for the most part.  Although I went one stitch at a time, the variegation was mostly nonexistent.  That’s the risk of ordering hand dyed thread online I suppose.  Even if the color “can” be variegated, the skein you receive may not be.  The charts include tiny 3/8″ black and white buttons, some of which serve useful purpose such as a the cat eyes, owl eyes, etc, but mostly they were just placed rather randomly and I didn’t like the look.  And I like charms, so I found 12 spooky charms to place throughout the chart(source: Fancifulbrass.com) .  Some charms fit into the negative space better than others, but overall I’m pleased, they jazz it up a lot in my opinion.  

My favorite parts are probably the big green frog (the only good stitchy frog!), and the creepy line with the owl and tombstone is super cute. The haunted house on the fright line is very effective despite its small stature, and the Franky on the monsters line shows his silly personality. 

It’s great to be done with another “bell pull” style design; this will go in place of “Living with Charm”, and “Merry Christmas by the Letter”, seasonally.