For @aggressivelyarospec‘s Aggressively Arospectacular 2022 week-long event, I have again undertaken a quest of daily creative offerings.
I’m kicking off proceedings with patches from kits that are so close to being pride-themed I didn’t make them over: Beutron’s watermelon and pineapple cross-stitch mini kits.
I may have squealed upon sighting these. Can a pre-existing kit be any more allo-aro?
I purchased these from Spotlight for $3 AUD each, and for that price they’re well worth converting into cross-stitch pride patches. The provided floss was of expected DMC quality, the aida swatch easily accommodated the design, and kits that aren’t packaged with the needle threaded through the fabric get bonus points. I also like that the pattern is printed on the reverse side of the cardboard packaging, because my paper patterns end up creased and bent from handling. As I often reuse kit patterns with my own materials, durability is appreciated!
The green flosses provided in these kits (DMC 699 to 703) also happened to be my preferred matches for the aro and allo-aro flags! I could have swapped the cream for white and the dark gold for a lighter gold, but the kit really is close as is. How do you look at that packaging and not see the allo-aro flag…?
The watermelon isn’t quite as perfect a flag match. To me, it reads as a combination of the aroflux and abro flags, as it uses cooler pinks like the abro flag and aro greens like the aroflux flag. That’s fine by me, since that combination roughly encompasses my place on the aromantic spectrum, but some folks may swap in warmer pinks or mintier greens for an accurate aroflux or abro flag representation.
I’m a fairly efficient stitcher, so I had just enough thread left from the pineapple to use for the watermelon’s greens and cream. (I saved the watermelon kit’s unused threads for future projects.) I also used half a skein of vintage cream floss for the buttonhole-stitched edges and assorted colours from my scrap box for additional sections of backstitch. Cutting and stitching the curves around the pineapple’s leaves was harder than I expected, and the left-hand side’s lumpiness shows where I ran into a bit of trouble! Beginners may prefer to stitch a solid background around the pineapple, forming a square or rectangle that’s easier to finish.
Folks with a thread stash can tweak these kits for better accuracy, but even when worked as intended, they allow complete cross-stitch newcomers to create subtle pride-related pieces. For a $3 kit, that’s a pretty awesome result.
(Will I be making more watermelon patches in abro and aroflux flag colours? Hell to the yes!)
Aro Worlds 