Too Cute To Spook

Too Cute To Spook by Les Petites Croix de Lucie (Ekaterina Chaykovskaya) — a small Halloween piece built entirely around the joke in its own signboard. The design is a cute Halloween sprite doing its absolute best to be menacing and failing completely:

• An oversized witch hat in slate blue-grey, slumped down over one eye, with an orange jack-o’-lantern face worked into the hatband and a few autumn leaves tucked into the brim.
• Enormous eyes — the real centrepiece — shaded from deep violet through blue to black, with white highlight stitches that make them read wet and glossy. Most of the colour range in the chart goes here.
• A soft blue-and-white fluffy body, worked in a loose painterly blend rather than flat blocks, so the sprite reads fluffy rather than pixelated.
• Three navy bats wheeling overhead, a tiny bee, and a fat orange jack-o’-lantern with a curling green stem sitting at the sprite’s feet.
• The signboard it’s holding up — planks on a wooden post, hand-lettered in black: TOO CUTE TO SPOOK — with small pumpkins and stars scattered around the letters.

The chart is 100w × 78h and calls for 18ct white aida. I went the other direction and stitched it on 32ct Picture This Plus Heroic linen over two — a pale sage-tan hand-dye with faint drifts of pink and blue mottled through it. On white aida the sprite would sit on a blank field; on Heroic the fabric does the work of a dusky autumn sky by itself, and the pink blooms in the dye pick up the violet in its eyes. DMC throughout.

Worked in two bursts — a week in mid-August, then picked back up in September and pushed to the finish. The last four days were all backstitch, which is what pulls the sprite and the lettering out of the blended stitching underneath.

Started August 15, 2026, finished September 23, 2026, and FFO’d October 20, 2026 in a 9” round hoop frame from ACMS (tapered profile, 1.25” wide), hand-painted in DMC 3750 — a deep navy that echoes the blues of the sprite’s fur and hat.