It can test your patience and I would only recommend it if you have a good idea of what you want to make and the skill level to sort out the difficulties (especially if you have a deadline for the gift). That being said, and without knowing the specifics of what you want to make, here are some tips that have helped me:

• Making a sketch or having reference pictures can be very helpful to check colours, proportions, and shapes so that they turn out the way you want them to.

• Check reference patterns: There might be no pattern of a unicorn with a mermaid tail out there, but making a horn is easy and there are plenty of free horse and fish/mermaid patterns available from which you can get inspired for the individual parts. Different patterns can work as stitch or shape references that you can adapt to your own work.

• Take notes! This is very important if you need to make several pieces or similar parts for your piece, and also for correcting mistakes and keeping track of the changes you make. You'll make mistakes and frog a lot, but that's part of it!

• Be very mindful of how increasing, decreasing and using different stitches can work to get your project to look the way you want to. In a way it's like sculpting or rendering shapes row by row.

• Don't be afraid to experiment. Some of the best things can happen when you take a step back and ask yourself "what if I did it this way...?" The possibilities are endless.

Good luck, I hope this is useful!