I bought this kit way back in 2005 with full intention of doing it as a gift for my brother. Years passed and more and more unfinished kits stacked on top of it, and piles of more interesting projects were chosen ahead of this one. Slowly but surely, I stopped buying up so many kits and the to-do stack was able to decompress. This rooster appearified once again for my potential selection... and was promptly put back aside in favor of the Storykeeper for stitchingpirates's Get it Done contest. After she was finished I needed another project to take with me to work and since I knew my brother was never going to get this as a gift, its time finally came. Extra nudge provided by DukeWaxeye since 2017 is the Chinese Year of the Rooster.

Kitted up, I took it along to H&R Block for the work day. Naturally (and pleasantly) people would ask me what I was working on. "A chicken." Yeah, well, for many weeks it was nothing but the quilted background as I slowly progressed from right to left, so this left many people confused. "You can't see it yet, but I promise, there will be a chicken there eventually." Lots of people were skeptical and who can really blame them, there wasn't a chicken to be seen until the end of tax season mid-April, and as soon as my job ended I promptly set the chicken aside to work on better things.

Well, recently I'd been feeling pretty guilty about the chicken just sitting there being neglected, so I picked it back up again and watched my brother play through video game after video game, and when he was sleeping I watched hours upon hours of DVR'd shows from as far back as 2014 that have just been sitting there, ignored like the chicken. A couple final pushes and here we are - done. Done. I really like chickens, they're a great bird type, comedic, delicious. But honestly this project took way too long and I hope I don't have to stitch another chicken for a very long time.

The main alteration for this piece was swapping out 90% of the black for 823 Navy Blue. The little square sectionals between each of the quilt squares were originally black and it was just bringing me down, it needed a little color. My main gals at stitchingpirates along with DukeWaxeye helped me narrow down from dark purple, green, red, and blue to just the blue, and the remaining black remained in the tail feathers and outlines. The alteration I always do is swapping out the french knots for beads - a thing I almost didn't do since it was the VERY LAST THING and when I finished stitching the whole piece I stared at it like, "Do I really want to do the beads? Can't I just call it done here?"

Well, no. I had to put the beads on. Otherwise I'd know in my heart that it was still incomplete after all this time and effort and that was simply unacceptable. The white bead is just a regular white bead, the yellow beads are rainbow-coated and slightly translucent and a gift from Bev-Choy. Minor alterations were mostly adjusting some color placement, making sure that the quilt pieces were consistently 1-5 tier'd, adding a few outlines here and there, etc. Very minor, but very constant. This pattern needed a lot of tweaking.