Nobody Wants to Make Superman Wear Lipstick

As it was my husband's birthday recently so I have been sneaking about trying to plan a card and cake without him knowing. This is quite a difficult task as I often ask his advice and run ideas past him, I also get him to do the whisking for cakes.

I chose to use a superman pixelpower pattern that I had bought last year. I love pixelpower designs, they are stylised yet still recognisable. I stitched mythbusters and R2D2 last year for cards and they went down really well. There are a lot of things I love about the designs, they are very specialist and quite geeky. There are a lot of designs that are good for boys/men which are generally harder to find. You order online and the patterns are sent to you by e-mail. I found the service quick and friendly as well as being convenient as you do not have to wait for posts. He has special offers from time to time and some amazing free patterns on his facebook page. I really want to do the futurama one as it is amazing. The patterns in the most part are all whole stitches with very little backstitch and just a few fractional stitches for eyes. Although there are multiple characters in each series, they stand alone well and would be a great starting stitch for a child. The patterns are well laid out, easy to follow and in colour. My one criticism would be that I sometimes feel that there should be more contrast between similar colours. I had this issue with Superman as the colour for the mouth was too close to the colour of the face and as a result he looked like he had no mouth.

Original mouth - not showing up as much as I would have liked.

I ended up unpicking and putting in another colour. This was all trial and error as too red and it looks like superman is wearing lipstick, and nobody wants to make superman wear lipstick. I also found a colour that I thought was dark enough but it still got lost. I think that colour combinations for stitching can be quite personal and some people like close colours with little variation. As the colour difference in the pixelpower designs often picks out features however, due to limited use of backstitch, I feel the gradient could be stronger without spoiling the design.

Finished card with altered mouth.

I was pleased with the finished card though I cannot help but feel this card by my little girl beat it...

My little girls hand print on a card for her Daddy.