Cross-stitching motorcycles

It’s a pretty normal thing to do a little cross-stitch for a new baby, right, with little pictures and the baby’s name and birthday?

Well, I finished the outer part of blueberry’s stitching last night! I think it’ll be perfect in the nursery.  🙂 I’ll put her name in next (no, we’re not telling) but obviously the birth date will have to be done a bit later. 😉

The little bikes are from cartoon clip art that I found online.  Three of the four hearts are from the book “A Rainbow of Stitches“; I made up the fourth pattern since the book only had three of that size.

That made me think of the other motorcycle-related stitching I’ve done.

This one was for Colleen, back in 2008.   Clearly I didn’t yet know how to use the hoops without making dirt marks, oops.  I did this piece from a photo of her KLR prior to buying the photo-to-pattern conversion software that I’m addicted to now.

This one is mostly satin stitch, done on the side of the MotoSport pannier bag for my cross-country trip on the F650GS in summer 2008.  I ran out of time and black thread to do the tires and have been telling myself for almost 4 years now that I’m going to finish that up any day now.

This next one was my first motorcycle-related stitching with the photo-to-pattern software.  The piece itself was for Steph’s birthday in 2010; the photo is from our trip to Alaska in 2004.  It’s one of my favorites for the great colors (as well as great memories).

Finally, I did this piece of the Ninjette last year.   I really like how the “real” colors are featured in the artificial/man-made part of the piece and the photograph is of the inverted/fake colors.  This piece currently lives in my cubicle at work.