"Alice: Madness Returns" Cross-Stitch

I will start by saying that every time I see this hanging on my boyfriend's wall I feel immensely satisfied. It's the first big cross-stitch project that I've finished and I couldn't be happier with how it turned out. 

It's an A4 piece of Alice Liddell and the Cheshire cat from American McGee's game "Alice: Madness Returns" and I used a free program called cstitch to get the pattern. The backstitches, border, and text are all made up (it's surprisingly difficult to find a pattern for suits of cards.) The whole thing took about a month to do in the odd hours of me being alone and it was finished just in time to give away for Christmas (as in, I think I wrapped it up on the 24th.) The boyfriend loves this game and actually has a tattoo of Chesh so I think I did good. Here's a huge picture of it:

I framed it before giving it away, of course; I'm not some kind of monster.

Some close-ups of Chesh, the writing, and the backstitches used for Alice's face:

The text reads "How fine you look when dressed in rage. Your enemies are fortunate that your condition is not permanent." Because Chesh is pretty bad-ass.

However, the only problem is... what if I have to match this level of effort every time?

Sew long, suckers.
L