Spooky Boo's Halloween Drum

Spooky Boo’s Halloween Drum by Praiseworthy Stitches — published in Just Cross Stitch Magazine, Halloween 2019 issue, page 80. Charted as a 3D drum-shaped ornament with two stitched panels seamed into a cylinder:

• Top of the drum (49w × 49h) — Spooky Boo’s lettered across the disc, with each letter built around a different Halloween character: a smiling pumpkin sitting beside the S, a purple spider dropping through the p, a black cat curled inside the o, a ghost behind the B, a small jack-o-lantern inside the o, and a crow on a perch capping the S. Tiny green stars and a small crescent moon scatter across the background. A few Halloween buttons are stitched on top of the panel as embellishment: a candy-corn pumpkin button, a purple bat button, and a yellow crescent moon button.
• Side band (123w × 30h) — wraps the cylinder; trick or treat in two-tone lettering with a black cat curled against a witch-hat-wearing jack-o-lantern scene tucked into the band, plus small green sparkles and stars trailing through the lettering.

Stitched on 32ct Picture This Plus Haunted Belfast Linen — a hand-dyed mottled teal-grey-purple linen that reads as a foggy haunted night sky under the lettering and motifs. The unstitched ground does all the atmosphere work without needing a stitched background. Threads are a mix:

• Weeks Dye Works and Gentle Arts Sampler Threads overdyes for the lettering and the soft tonal shifts on the pumpkins, ghost, and cat.
• Kreinik metallics for the small stars, the moon glow, and the ghost’s wispy highlights.
• DMC filling out the rest where solids worked better than overdyes.

Specialty stitches and beadwork called for in the chart layered in toward the end of the project.

Started August 17, 2025. Finished October 12, 2025 — about two months of stitching, finishing just in time for Halloween.