February 6th, 2008 | 9 Comments »

I had this truly batshit idea last month to replicate the original Fargo movie poster in actual (i.e. not digital) cross stitch for Fox’s birthday. (She loves the movie as much as I and I wanted to see if it could be done.)

It CAN:

I learned several things:

1. Cross stitch is NOT as fun (to me) as knitting.

2. Expect delays-elaborate borders take much TIME and you should add many hours to your initial estimation and might (cough) miss the deadline.

3. Not everyone ‘gets’ or has seen Fargo, so you have a lot of ‘splaining to do when working on this project in public.

4. It was totally worth it! (See the reaction HERE and HERE.)

UPDATE: I have no pattern for this. I made the beast by using a photo of the original movie poster blown up very, very large so you could see all the little pixels. It served as a pseudo-’pattern’ and it was not really to ‘scale’ (It didn’t exactly match the gauge of the grid of the cross stitch fabric) so I had to wing it a little and create the same overall shapes and shadows. I am not very skilled with cross stitch, so it probably has many imperfections. The text was backstitched except for the “Fargo” logo, which I drew on at the very end with pencil then filled in with thread using a very imperfect embroidery technique- and yes- that is a real needle.

Overall it is a success and I think it is sort of “funny looking” (like the little guy) dontcha know.