Of course, the penguins on the Isaac and Alexander stockings have to be walking on snow. Should it be soft and fluffy or icy and crunchy? My answer is both.

The large penguin on Issac’s stocking is walking of soft fluffy snow which is a variation of the oblong cross stitch. I have worked it across only one horizontal canvas thread rather than on two canvas threads as shown  in The Needlepoint Book by Joe Ippolito Christensen.

This diagram shows it done in two different thread colors because it is worked in two separate parts. First worked the light yellow stitches and then the dark yellow stitches, but both with the same slightly off-white thread. I used a slight off-white thread so that the stark white of the penguin would be more pronounced.

The Santa Penguin looks like he is walking on a cloud. Having worked the stitches over just one canvas thread, I got a thick, dense stitch which added a nice dimension.

And yes, he is not finished! He will get an eye for which I will use a glass bead and maybe a tie around his sack.

When I got to the penguin on the Alexander stocking, I decided that I didn’t like him floating in the blue as printed in my design.  I thought that I would put him on some soft snow like Santa penguin. It didn’t work. So, he was bound to get the icy snow. Using a vertical giant knitting stitch, I put him on ice.

I worked the stitches from left starting at the top of each column of stitches. Since there wasn’t any snow printed on my canvas, I was free to put in an many icy spikes and as irregularly as I wanted. The fact that the printed background was blue, the finish stitches have an even icier feel because a bit of the blue peaks through.

Again I used a slightly off-white thread to contract the little penguins white and he needs an eye, too.

If you look closely at the two penguins, you might notice that the two skies behind the penguins look irregular.  It is not just the lighting, They are! In the next blog, I will explain the stitches and threads I used.

I’ll probably use the same oblong cross stitch for the exhaust of Santa’s plane on Issac’s stocking. What do you think?