Pooh the Barbarian

First off - I know, I know.
This piece involves some questionable legalalities, and please don't sue me, Disney.

But I did a thing!  I was super excited and had so much fun with this.

And just so you know how this happened:

At some point in the past week, somewhere, in one of the general FB cross stitch groups, someone posted a finished Winnie the Pooh thing based on this illustration:

Someone else asked where they got the pattern, and the stitcher mentioned it was a freebie, but she didn't remember where she found it.   This got my little wheels turning, because it's a Winnie the Pooh, and that IP belongs to Disney, who isn't so much up with "free."

Sure enough, I used my GoogleFu to find the blog where someone did, indeed, chart out this saying (for a swap).    She actually has a download link to the PDF of the pattern she made.   Now, I'm not going to link to it, because, again with the questionable legalities, but it's not hard to find with Google and the correct phrasing.   I mean, we're individual bloggers, parody, personal use, etc. etc., but I just don't want to have that fight.

Anyway, the hamster wheels kept spinning in my head and I really, really liked that chart and had an idea.

I have occasional giggle fits whenever I see the different quotes that people overlay on Winnie the Pooh illustrations, and this one is probably my favorite:

The innocence and sweetness of the Pooh juxtaposed with the brutality of Conan is just too much for me.

So I did what any overactive mind does and I used Patternmaker to make the mostly same chart as the other blogger and then I did the lettering for the Conan quote.  I did, briefly, consider changing "lamentations" to "bothers" in true Pooh fashion, which also makes me giggle, but ultimately, that lamentations word is so crucial to the quote that I wanted to keep it.

The obvious thing I changed in the design was adding the iconic red shirt to Pooh.   I think, by virtue of my age, I'm much more familiar with Pooh in his red shirt (actually, now that I think of it, I think 99% of my Winnie the Pooh memories/familiarity are thanks to the Kingdom of Hearts videogames). I am more familiar with Piglet in his darker pink/purple jumper, which is how other blogger designed it, but I like the version with the green the better and went that direction.

I didn't pay attention to the colors the original designer used, and chose what I thought would look good from the floss I have on hand (which would be all DMC).

I decided to backstitch the woods with 2 strands instead of 1 (which is how I backstitched everything else) to give it a bit more solidity/depth.   I also only used one strand when I half stitched the sky and shadows because I wanted them to have a lighter effect.

In any event, I love the heck out of this piece and I had so much fun stitching it.

Winnie the Pooh (and characters) are © Disney, the Conan quote is probably © Universal (the studio that made Conan the Barbarian), but even that quote is derivative of something that Genghis Kahn supposedly said.