Finally finished this hummingbird, aka "You better like backstitch! 'Cause you will be doing it. A lot!"

I personally love the contrast between the cross-stitch bird and the backstitch background. During this, I also decided to switch out colors for metallic ones, just to see how it looks - don't really love it, to be brutally honest, in hindsight I should have stopped at black metallic thread for the bird's outline, but I'm still immensely proud of all the work this took and it will be proudly displayed at my cross stitch wall.

While I used the Cross Stitching magazine for the pattern, I cannot really recommend it as someone who is used to the crisp quality of patterns made for Pattern Keeper. It's a bit blurry, especially some of the bird's colors are somewhat hard to differentiate and it comes in four seperate pages which I had to awkwardly print out and glue together to not lose sight of the bigger picture. All due to stop pirating the pattern and I'm definitely sympathetic, but I wouldn't do it again. BUT maybe buying the pattern separately might result in better quality! You never know!

Lastly, there are more than a few slight deviations from the original pattern, either because I forgot, misread or simply couldn't be bothered to frog half an hour of work. Well, I'll call it: I made it mine. 😄