Finally, FINALLY, F- I- N- A -L- L- Y Finished!

Do you remember last year when I started making a counted-cross stitch blanket for Collette? Oh, what's that you say? You don't? Perhaps that's because I started it A YEAR AGO. In fact, when I started the blanket, Collette looked like this:


Well, my bloggy friends, the blanket is FINALLY DONE! What took me so long? I can never do anything the simple way. In addition to having a baby during the time that I was working on it, I decided that I didn't like some of the rows of letters (specifically, there was one row with no animals in it, unlike ever other row) so I decided to change it, which required finding and creating an animal with one of the letters that previously had no animal. Once I did that, then I realized my block design was off, so I had to change every other letter after the one I changed (the "U"). And I decided I wanted a block for Collette's name and birth date, so I had to change some more. And THEN I decided that I wanted to put the elephant from her nursery in that square, so I had to create it and sketch it and then cross stitch it. But I finally did it!

The whole blanket:


An up-close of the two rows I changed:


For comparison, here is a picture of how the afghan was originally.

And here is a close-up of the Collette square I created:


I tried to replicate this elephant in her nursery:


Overall, I'm happy with it, even though I'm a perfectionist and I will always see things I could change or make better. Hopefully Collette will enjoy it!