The Guardian

I've been working on the border colours for The Guardian this past week. I say colours and not just the border as I finished off all the stitches in those colours, even where they showed up in the main piece.

Once I finished the cross stitches, I decided to just finish off the border, so I started backstitching it too. I don't usually do any backstitching until the very end of the piece, but in this case the border is very separate from the rest, and I wanted to be rid of it! You can see the line where the backstitching stops: the scroll frame I'm using isn't big enough to show the whole piece at once, so that's what I had visible for the bottom section. The border really does look so much nicer with the backstitching defining the strands of the Celtic knot.

I also drew grid lines on for the center since I'll be jumping around a lot. I'm hoping this will speed up a bit now that the border's done: one of the colours in the border had over 5000 stitches!