Update on the Cat Tree

It’s been awhile since we’ve looked at my cat tree. As you can see I’m just about finished stitching the tree itself and I’ve started stitching the cats.

I used blue or green #12 metallic to do the eyes but I still have to do the copper eyes on a couple of the cats. I added the pink noses as well. All the cats now have their collars and tags.

My husband said yesterday that naughty kitties who climb trees should always wear collars and tags.

The Brads

I have also test fit the round silver brads and the wonderful starburst brad that will be the tree topper. I love using brads because they have such a different look on your needlepoint. It’s also a very good idea to test fit them before you stitch everything.

Often it can be hard to judge how the brad will look in context. I discovered this with the tree topper. My package had two colors of starbursts in it, black white. I tried the white first but it just didn’t pop against the white background. Because I have other trees in this series that have white backgrounds, I’m committed to this color.

Clearly white would not work. As you can see by my fuzzy picture, black looks much better. I do think that another starburst in a color, gold, or silver would be even better. This has me thinking that with brads you should probably push the color a bit.

The Holly Leaves

I purchased some Just Another Button Company Buttons for the holly but I have not sewn them on. The leaf color is pretty close to the tree color, so I’m hoping that the different texture will be enough for them to be seen.

I’ll be adding them next.

The Cats

I decided initially that I wanted my cats to look realistic and picked colors accordingly.

I have started working on the “solid” cats. I stitched the grey cat, who is a Persian and stitched using Wisper. My plan is to brush him slightly after the background is stitched.

I stitched the black and tortiseshell cats, using hand-spun threads from Dragonfly Lotus from my stash.

The grey and black cats look fine with the same grey thread defining the legs in both. But defining legs on the tortiseshell was a problem. Because the thread has two distinct colors twisted together the brown I used for the legs disappears in the whole. In this case that isn’t a problem because the brindle coat of these cats tends to confuse lines. But it would be a problem with other colors.

An Upcoming Problem

The white cat is the only solid cat left to do.But with the white background, it might cause a visual hole in the canvas.

What would you do to fix this: give him spots? make him an entirely different color? or something else entirely?

I’d love to hear your ideas.