And here's what it was supposed to look like…

I tend to treat cross-stitch patterns as more of a guideline than something I have to strictly follow, and like to add my own personal touches, especially when I’m making a gift. And this secret project was no exception. Here’s the photo from the magazine I took the pattern from:

As you can see, I made one or two wee changes 🙂

The first change was to the fabric colour – I thought the cream on cream look was just too bland, so chose the blue-grey because it made the other colours pop out from the background (oh, and it was kind of because I already had that fabric in my stash, and was too impatient to get started to go and buy something different 🙂 but mainly it was because I liked the effect, honestly!)

Then I removed the angel wings. Sorry, I just don’t do angels. And even if I did, the wings look kind of tacked on in that picture. Plus, isn’t there something sort of creepy about the image of bride as angel? Maybe it’s just me, but I read it as “floating around heaven in a wedding dress because she dropped dead on her wedding day”, which isn’t really the wishes I want to send to rarsberry!!! And once the wings were gone, the dove had to go too, to keep the composition balanced.

I thought the cross-stitching over the front of her dress was a bit ugly, so that was next to go. Then I made a few changes to the rest of the back-stitching. It’s a bit hard to tell from this photo, but a few of the roses were supposed to have pink back-stitching, but I didn’t think it really worked, so I just carried on with the dark olive. And I used a dark brown for the backstitch in her hair instead of black – I don’t often like black back-stitching, because it tends to be quite harsh, plus I had rarsberry’s hair colour in mind. Oh, and I removed the french knots round the edge of the heart, because they just look silly.

The last change was to remove the borders, which I’ll admit was mainly motivated by the fact that I was running out of time 🙂 but also because without the wings there is a large empty space in the top of the picture, and I thought the borders might draw attention to that a bit much. But it was mainly the time thing. And at 11 o’clock last night, the thought of all those additional french knots was just too much.

So, that’s the FutureCat thought process in going from pretty picture in magazine to finished cross-stitch.

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