Embroidered musings on the evils of vegemite

I have a confession to make. As an Australian, I am a failure and a lie. The reason? I do not understand Vegemite. It is not excellent, it is not amazing. It is a black pit of terror and doom which should never come into contact with my breakfast. To foist it on unsuspecting tourists as a cultural delicacy has always seemed to me to be the worst kind of cruelty. Vegemite tastes terrible.

Having thus outed myself to the scorn and derision of my fellow countrymen, I shall continue:

When faced with the recent Phat Quarter food-themed swap, I was totally stumped for ideas, so I asked my partner what foods she favored. In amongst the list of foods I received, she mentioned that she was particularly glad to be getting a piece from Australia. Accordingly, I decided to stitch something particularly Australian. (Or should that be UnAustralian?)

This piece was inspired by the Amanda Palmer song Vegemite (The Black Death). It’s a beautiful love song, in which the protagonist declaims that she will “refuse to touch or kiss you for a week if you insist on putting that foul death paste in your mouth”. I empathise.

Originally, I designed this piece to be cross-stitched. However, I soon realised that if this piece was done in  cross-stitch, I would be able to hear the deadline whooshing past before I even changed colours. Instead I used the pattern I’d charted to create templates for felt shapes – much more sensible for large blocks of colour!

If anyone would like to make their own anti-vegemite statement, I’ve uploaded the cross-stitch chart to my free patterns page. If you too feel that cross-stitching it would be excessive, just cut along the colour border lines to create handy templates.