Another baby! Unlike baby Evelyn, baby Noah is known to us only through his paternal grandparents, who are members of our Small Group (groups within our church that meet for Bible study, chat, support, prayer, encouragement and so on, all by Zoom at the moment) so just one card needed this time. But not simply a repeat of Evelyn’s motif; that would just feel like a production line!

What then? Well, with a baby called Noah what could it be but an ark? I grabbed a scrap of paper to sketch a quick idea (and only afterwards noticed it had some scribbles on it for last week’s group meeting – how appropriate). The smudgy lines at the top are a rainbow, the circle outline is the size of the aperture of the card I want to use.

Then it was a matter of tidying it up in my image editing program, where I also added a cloud and some words. I didn’t draw in the individual rainbow lines; instead, I intended to do the top line in red, the bottom line in purple, and then work inwards from both ends spacing the colours out more or less (as it turned out definitely less) evenly. At this point I didn’t decide whether to go for a solidly filled rainbow or just thin lines of colour, but thought it would probaby be the latter as the rest was going to be outline-only as well. The cloud would have a detached buttonhole frilly edge, possibly in a fluffy thread like the clouds in the Hope designs.

Just because I could I printed the design out in three sizes, and found aperture cards to go with the two larger sizes. And then I decided that although the smallest size would probably look really nice done in one strand of cotton, the detail would be easier to show in the largest size, stitched using two strands. I would keep the smallest one to stitch in one strand at some later time, but for now go with the version I could be reasonably sure would work.

Time to start stitching! Cotton sateen again, as it doesn’t need a backing fabric, and this time simply good old DMC stranded cotton; it has so many colours to choose from, which makes a nice change from some of the speciality threads.

As you can see I pre-wrote “BOY” in silver gel pen, intending to stitch “it’s a” on top of the rainbow; I mean, on top of the stitching. That was clearly not going to work but I pushed that problem away for the moment and got on with the rest of the design. I do like this non-solid way of stitching the rainbow, though!

Eventually I wrote the additional words in a very fine blue drawing pen, and outlined the silver letters. Then I added a frilly edge to the cloud. I caught the thread once or twice so it’s not as neat as I would have liked it to be, but then clouds aren’t regular, are they? Inside the card I quoted a children’s song that was part of our online Sunday service only a few days before he was born: “The Lord was good, the Lord was strong / And Noah lived his life for Him”.

By now the card has been delivered, but I’m still playing with the design and tweaking it here and there. The boat definitely needs some colour besides the three browns, but the ones I used were a bit too different from the rest of the design. I will try using colours from the rainbow, or slightly lighter shades from the same series. I also picked a slightly lighter green for the rainbow and lowered the windows a bit. The fluffy cloud detached buttonhole edge works OK in the larger version but for the smaller version I’ll go with stem stitch in fluffy thread, and I may also try simply stem stitching the outline without any fluff at all. And when I’m happy with them I’ll write the instructions and pop it on the website for you to create your own celebratory ark!