Bumble — Rudolph
The Abominable Snow Monster of the North, holding the Christmas-tree star and tangled in coloured fairy lights. First of six characters from an OOP Dimensions Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer plastic-canvas ornament kit, restitched on opalescent Lugana.
- Designer
- Dimensions (OOP kit)
- Fabric
- 32ct Be Stitch Me Opalescent Middle Earth Lugana
- Floss
- DMC
- Finished
- December 2023
Bumble — the Abominable Snow Monster of the North from the 1964 Rankin/Bass Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer TV special. He starts the movie as the antagonist roaring at Rudolph and friends across the North Pole, and ends it reformed and toothless (after Yukon Cornelius performs a little impromptu dentistry on him) putting the star on top of the Christmas tree at Santa’s workshop — which is the moment this chart captures: shaggy white-and-blue fur, no teeth, small red bow on his head, holding the yellow star, and tangled up in a string of multicoloured C7 fairy lights.
This is piece 1 of 6 from an out-of-print Dimensions kit — Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer Plastic Canvas Christmas Ornament Counted Cross Stitch Kit — six character ornaments from the movie, originally intended to be stitched on plastic canvas and finished as hanging tree ornaments. The full set, visible on the kit cover (second image), is Hermey the Misfit Elf, Santa, Rudolph, Clarice (Rudolph’s girlfriend, in the red bow), Bumble, and Sam the Snowman (the bowler-hatted narrator with the umbrella). I’ll be adding the other five as separate gallery entries as I finish them.
The kit is OOP (Dimensions retired the line), so the original kit-supplied threads aren’t replaceable — I converted the Dimensions colours to DMC equivalents and stitched it in DMC. Reads identically on the finished piece.
Rather than the kit’s intended plastic canvas, I used 32ct Be Stitch Me Opalescent Middle Earth Lugana I had in my stash — a pale beige Lugana woven with iridescent thread, so the unstitched ground around Bumble flickers like snow catching light when you turn the piece. You can see the sparkle in the photo. Plastic canvas would have given a blockier, more toy-like finish; the opalescent Lugana turns it into something closer to a small framed scene.
Threads are DMC throughout, with black backstitch doing all the linework — the fur tufts around Bumble’s silhouette, his mouth and eyes, the cord of the fairy-light string winding around his body, and the outline of every individual bulb.
Finished December 18, 2023.