Cauldron Repair

Cauldron Repair by Fine Frog Stitching — a mock shop sign for a cauldron repair business, staffed entirely by one very professional rat. The designer’s own pitch sets the tone: “Is your favorite cauldron rusty, leaky, or has simply seen better days? No worries — have your cauldron repaired here!”

This one was a prize. My team won the Frogwarts House Cup in 2025, and the chart came as one of the winnings from The Black Needle Society — the same folks behind the annual Frogwarts online stitching retreat and Kathryn Landis’s seven-year band sampler I finished earlier this year.

The design is staged like a painted signboard:

• A grey-and-white rat perched on the rim of an enormous cauldron, wearing a yellow bow tie and a monocle — dressed for the job, inspecting the merchandise.
• Great curling ribbons of green smoke arcing up and over behind him, the one cool colour against all the pink.
• The cauldron itself in hot magenta with CAULDRON REPAIR lettered across its belly in green and gold, and the price underneath: $10.
• Along the bottom, the actual joke in green capitals — SATISFACTION MOSTLY GUARANTEED.
• Pink clouds, a thin crescent moon, scattered stars and sparkles filling the field, all held inside a double border of magenta and orange with bracketed corners and a dotted inner rule.

The chart is 90w × 118h in 20 DMC colours, with the model stitched on 32ct Lugana in Logwood. I went to 32ct Dyeing for Cross Stitch Crushed Velvet linen instead, in the Dark pour — the dyer does this colourway in light, medium and dark, and dark is the one that reads as a proper mottled night-purple rather than a lavender. Against that ground the magenta cauldron and the acid-green smoke both go genuinely loud, which a neutral would have flattened.

Started October 26, 2025 and worked in long gaps — a couple of sessions that winter, a solid run through March 2026, a prep session in June ahead of that summer’s Frogwarts retreat, then picked up again in October. Finished October 11, 2026, nearly a year to the day from the first stitch: 19 sessions and about 5,600 stitches, which is essentially the chart’s full count.