The pursuit of perfection – or taking it a bit too far?

For the last few weeks, I’ve been working on a plastic canvas box. It’s taken me longer than I expected – it’s my own design and that design keeps changing as I try different things. This time, however, I’ve come up against what is, to me, a major design flaw. Just when I thought I’d finished the actual stitching on the box and was putting all the bits together.

My starting point was this.


Winter Snowflakes from Kick Back and Stitch. I stitched it a while ago, but it’s never been finish finished as I couldn’t think how to do it in a way that would show it off the way I wanted to. Then, a few weeks ago, I saw this post on Craftypod and all of a sudden things clicked together in my mind and I came up with the idea of making a plastic canvas box with my Winter Snowflakes in the lid. And I could use the many of the same threads, stitches and so on in stitching the box that I used in the original design. I still think it sounds like a fantastic idea!

So, first of all, I made this for the base of the box. It’s far too nice for the base of a box, but hey-ho that’s what it’s for.


Then I made some box sides.


The diagonal stitch pattern used here (can't remember what the stitch is called) appears in the Winter Snowflakes design, but I’ve used my own choice of colours. Then I decided that the box sides weren’t going to be tall enough for the type of box I wanted to try. So the box sides became the sides of a box lid.

And when Winter Snowflakes was mounted on some stiff card and fitted into the lid, it was perfect!



So I stitched some different, taller box sides, stitched them to the base and stitched up the sides.


Then, full of anticipation, I popped on the lid.


Looks OK in this photo, but it’s not perfect! The lid doesn’t come as far down the sides as I’d planned – it’s supposed to come down to the darker area between the two horizontal bands. And the box is now just too tall for what I wanted!



So I’m not sure at the moment what the next step is. I suspect it will involve dismantling the box sides and possibly stitching something completely different. But all this stitching on plastic canvas used a mountain of thread and I’ve run out of the dark blue #5 pearl cotton I’d been using. I don’t know, if I completely frog the sides, whether the threads will be re-usable. And I’ve also run out of one of the colours of metallic braid I was using too and I really didn’t want to spend a small fortune on making this!