Winging It

Every so often I get the urge to start a relatively small and quick project.  This time I got the urge to do a small cross stitch piece of a horse by Jan Sorrells that I’d found ages ago in a cross stitch magazine (I’m not sure which one — all I have is a couple of pages torn out of a magazine my mother or grandmother originally had).  I’ve been wanting to do that horse for a while, plus I have some random 14 count aida I want to use up and a bunch of unnumbered bobbins of floss I’d like to work through.

Turns out the piece of fabric would have literally three stitches to spare on either side of the cross stitching.

Meh, I was planning on finishing it as a wall hanging, not framing it, so I can make this work with some fray check and careful handling.

Then I spent a bit of time checking my available floss against images of the DMC floss called for.  I didn’t have enough browns, but I can give the horse a blue halter instead of a brown one and use some blended needles. I had a couple of colors that I’d picked out but changed after I started working with them and realized they didn’t work as well as I’d thought they would. This is after about a week’s worth of work: