Making progress
(Yeah, I know, I don’t update my diary for a week, and then make three entries in one day. Such is life.)
I’ve almost finished the cross-stitch part of my secret project!
Just a few more stitches to go to fill in that wee gap down in the bottom left there, and then it’s just the backstitch. “Just” being a relative term, of course, because there’s a LOT of backstitch.
And getting to this stage means I can’t put off the dreaded backstitch colour choice for any longer. You may think that black would be the obvious choice, but pure black tends to look too stark for backstitch, especially when you’re stitching against blank canvas, as I will be. Normally I like to do backstitch in very dark brown, but that just wouldn’t work against the shade of grey the fabric is, so I had in mind a nice dark grey, of the same purple-grey tone as the fabric, but a lot darker. All very good in theory, but finding such a colour was a lot more difficult in practice, so I’ve spent the last 20 minutes or so going through all my embroidery cotton, but every grey I pulled out was too blue, or too brown, or too green, or too pale, or… But eventually I did manage to find one that I think I’m happy with (of course, I may well change my mind once I’ve actually started stitching it…) It may seem a lot of effort for something that will just look black when it’s stitched anyway (and probably looks black in the photo, so you’ve got no idea what I’m going on about!), but it really will make a difference – backstitch in a colour that’s even subtly wrong could totally ruin the whole effect.