Despite an initial setback (some mistake that I can't even find) my Roman mosaic cross-stitch is going well. I've finished a good portion of the skull now, though it's less than I'm letting myself imagine since I'm filling in all the white squares with white thread. I just needed more work to do. Oh, and I'm crazy and apparently have a desire to have constantly aching eyes and hands.
On the side I've finished the pattern for a blackwork piece for my dad. It's hard to look at because I've changed several aspects but I like the main border I've chosen and really like the font. I'm doing two smaller borders on top (and bottom) of the main one (four or five squares high) and then a taller more eleborate border on top of that. The elaborate outermost borders on the top and bottom with have some color worked in, while the rest of the borders will be dark green and the text with be black.
My intent is to have it be sampler-ish. The quote is an old rhyme, Victorian, I believe, but possibly older than that. So in my head I can imagine women then using common rhymes as text for samplers and then filling the rest with border and motif practice and such. I also need to start work on a traditional family sampler thing for my sister and her family. You know, the classic names and dates of birth and such.
The picture is a bit all over but for the rhyme I'm doing the first two borders (top and bottom) and the fourth border. I got carried away and was trying to make it a square piece but gave up on that because my eyes were going really bleary. I was initially doing the dot/slash on the "i" but it was making the spacing weird in a few spaces so I decided to drop it (but didn't feel like going back and erasing it). I really think the font fits the quote.
The borders are from Lesley Wilkins Traditional Blackwork Samplers and the font is adapted from one in that book. The corner piece and border on the vertical side is my adaptation of the horizontal one. I especially like how the corner piece came out, though I ended up having to drop it so the spacing will work out correctly.
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