Celtic Cross

Once again, it's been months since I managed to find the time to Blog.  What with Ferg and Helen getting married, work, and just general stuff, I've been rather busy. So, I've got myself one of those little tablet thingys, and off I go on catch up!

OK, so the last thing I blog'd about was the embroidery of Bede. Since then, I've done another two embroideries for the Guild's exhibition in Durham Cathedral.

Bede was created for the Saints of the North competition, but there was another competition running alongside that one, called Knots and Crosses. Obviously, this screamed Celtic, but where to find the perfect cross to recreate?

I'd been looking around for a while, but hadn't found anything. Then I saw a photo I really liked, which was posted to a Facebook group called Northumberland. It's a good place to find some very good photos. I'd love to show you all the particular photo than inspired this, but despite my asking the photographer if I could print the photo and use as a starting point, he never did answer me (which seemed a little rude!)

I used his photo anyway just to get the general shape of the Celtic work, but wasn't exactly sure how I wanted to stitch it. It seemed fairly obvious from the start that it would look best done on a grid, as opposed to free stitched, so I drew it out onto graph paper. I was still no further forward as to stitch technique, until I glanced at my bookshelf and noticed a book I'd forgotten I'd bought on canvas work. Another excellent Barter Books buy!

So in the end it became a canvas work piece. I stitched the cross and the stem on separate pieces, using a variety of stitches. The Celtic knot work in the center of the cross is couched handmade cord, and the piece in the center of the stem is woven.

Once the stitching was completed, I found another problem, however. I now had two pieces of work that somehow needed to be attached, and no idea how I was going to do it!

A chance conversation with Lesley one day ended with us wandering into a fabric shop. She had not seen any of the work, and only had my rough description of colours to go on, but her idea was to back it (somehow) onto a purple velvet. I found the perfect fabric, cut out the already stitched cross pieces and attached with a simple blanket stitch in black.

The finished cross looked very ecclesiastical once stretched and pinned. I didn't win any prizes for it, but once it was on display in the exhibition I was approached to sell. :-)