Poster of an Old Rodeo

After my foray into hand embroidery I knew I wanted to return to cross stitch but I had to wait for an idea to strike which happened when I read the Hatch Show Print book recently. A page at the front of the book features a silhouette of a rodeo wrangler with the chorus of Angel from Montgomery by John Prine and that was my starting point. While the song is actually written from the point of view of an old woman (the first line is “I am an old woman”) I remembered how much I identified with the third verse as a young stay at home mom so I decided to include it. And while the second verse begins, “When I was a young girl, I had me a cowboy” as I searched for images of old rodeo posters I thought a female rider spoke more to the feelings I had when I played my Bonnie Raitt record over and over again.

This was probably the trickiest pattern I ever designed. I did the lettering of the lyrics with 2 threads directly on the 20 count cork linen since I found it very hard to do it on graph paper first and I made a lot of changes as I stitched.

I began the rodeo poster with this image but I put her in a blue work shirt and bluejeans and gave her red cowboy boots, gloves, and a red cowboy hat. Since I really wanted her hat to show and since I thought it would be too hard to cross stitch her face I used the head from another poster as well.

I had to make changes while I was stitching here too as some of the colors got lost next to each other. I found the saddle particularly challenging to work out on the graph paper and then when I stitched it turned out that the rust color of the saddle couldn’t be too near to the red of the boots so I had to redesign it while stitching.

I also searched Rodeo cross stitch lettering and using a couple of those as references designed my own letters to give some of the flavoring of the original letters. After I had stitched those letters and the horse and rider I added more type to mimic the look of actual posters.

I stitched the image and lettering of the poster with three threads and the background with two threads using two similar colors to mimic the antiqued look of the original poster.

While stitching this I confirmed that I prefer the way I do cross stitch to the way others say to do it. The author of a cross stitch book I recently purchased writes that you want to have all your x’s crossed the same way because it just looks neater but I realized that apparently Neater is Not what I’m looking for!