I love the idea of wooden stitchable pieces. In fact, this is the third wooden piece I’ve done. (Check out my butterfly here and my keychain here.) I haven’t been very happy with my experience with any of these project, but sadly this most recent kit was the worst of the bunch.

Bucilla Stitchable Shapes – Santa

The wooden piece itself is nice. It is surprisingly thick, and the holes are all drilled completely through. Everything is finished nicely, so there are no rough areas for your floss to get caught on. The instructions, though, are barely adequate. It is difficult to decipher which holes you need to be using for the stitches zigzagging across the hat and the moustache. And, weirdly, the translation into French and Spanish is patchy. (E.g. Step 3 is repeated in English for all three languages.)

Ooops, no more white but all kinds of other colours are left.

Where the kit really falls down is in the supplied cotton floss. Not only is the floss poor quality (DMC it is not), there is both too much and not enough. It seems like the same bundle of floss is thrown in all the kits in this series, so you are given lots of colours that you don’t need. However, there was nowhere near enough white to finish off this piece. (See the picture above. That is all the floss I had left, and all the empty areas needed to be stitched white.) Thankfully, I was able to more or less match the white included in the kit with some old J&P Coats floss, and then I finished off the swirls in the beard using DMC E5200 Light Effects. (I used Light Effects because I was feeling masochistic that day.)

Santa and his sparkly beard

I’m happy with the finished product, but I will not buy another one of these kits. For the price, I most certainly expect to have all the materials I need to finish the project as it is charted. :/

(This is an edited and expanded version of my review for this item on Amazon.ca.)