Yesterday instead of doing homework like I had planned I spent the afternoon designing and then trying out a cross stitch pattern for an Orthodox cross. Since the sketch I made looks horrendous I won't even attempt to show it here, but it was fun to design, though not so easy to actually embroider.
In all fairness though it being difficult to embroider wasn't my design's fault, but more my choice of fabric. Instead of using a nice clean piece of fabric made for counted cross stitch I rebelled and used a piece of natural linen. I then had to decide how many fibers would make up a square inch (I decided on 4x4), and where actually to start with the pattern and the fabric. I quickly discovered that some of the fibers were really thick, while others were really thin, and that the fibers running horizontally were consistently thicker than the fibers running vertically, so instead of getting perfect squares I was getting odd-shaped rectangles.
Needless to say I persevered and finished the design, only slightly modified from the original due to my not paying attention and missing a row (whoops!) but it still worked out fine and I was very happy with the results.
What I am not happy with however is the quality of the photos I took. I don't know what it was about it that my camera seemed to dislike so much but all of the color balances seemed WAY off and didn't like my trying to fix them in photoshop AT ALL.
The photo above is the only one where the colors looked like they appear in real life, though if you notice the bottom of the image is blurred because the shot was out of focus.
The cross embroidery ultimately became a bookmark and now resides in my copy of The Lenten Spring holding my place for me so I can pick up where I left off every morning.
I think I'll attempt to redo my design and make it a little simpler and less busy. My ultimate goal is to make a basket cover for our Pascha basket this year, but that might not happen if I don't end up finding a design I like.
The other thing that happened yesterday was that our new icons arrived in the mail. We've had a blank space on our icon wall around our icon of the Harrowing of Hell that we've been trying to figure out what to fill with and we finally decided on small icons of the Nativity and of the Ascension. We turned to our favorite website to order icons from Uncut Mountain Supply and a few weeks later viola! they're in our mailbox.
The icon of the Nativity will go to the left of the icon of the Harrowing of Hell and the icon of the Ascension will go to the right, that way they will stay in festal order.
Now the question is just how long it will take Granite to actually get them up on the wall... Considering that we've had a broken chair that needs to be fixed for a few months now it doesn't look like it will be soon, but maybe the fact that Pascha is coming up soon will spur Granite into putting them up sooner rather than later
...And the last thing I did yesterday was make a loaf of thyme bread which Granite and I heartily enjoyed so much we ate over half of it. I was looking forward to having some more of it today but it was suspiciously gone when I got out of bed. Oh well, I hope Granite enjoys it for lunch, I can always make another loaf and not tell him about it =^)
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Update! Last night (Thursday the 24th) Granite hung up the new icons, yay!
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