Hello everyone,
I'd definitely be interested in cross stitch patterns, thank you, especially if they're either directly based on Narnia or can be given a Narnian interpretation!
I'm a cross stitch addict myself — never a popular hobby for the under-40s (yes, I still am), but I took it up in my teens, with Mum's encouragement, and have never looked back. Preferably counted cross stitch, thanks — pre-printed designs are cheating
(and not nearly as exciting as seeing the work grow stitch by stitch from nothing into a complete picture!)
I hugely admire anyone who can do freehand embroidery, but that's way beyond me — I need Aida squares or countable evenweave threads to follow!! But I do what I can and I've almost always got a design on the go, or sometimes more than one. At the moment I'm partway through a design of Mrs Tiggy-winkle from Beatrix Potter's stories (another of my all-time favourite children's authors/illustrators) and also a very small, simple kit that I can take with me when I'm travelling anywhere — a bookmark with a design of grapes and the quote "I am the vine, you are the branches" from John 15:5.
What I thought others here might like to see is a piece I finished about four years ago (gosh, where has the time gone??
) — made from a pattern in a Christmas edition of a cross stitch magazine (it was
Cross Stitch Gold, published here in the UK). This is the only explicitly Narnian cross stitch design I've ever found, so I just had to make it and had a very enjoyable time doing so! (
And I was chuffed — delighted, that is, in UK and Oz slang — to see they gave Lucy golden hair.)
Here's the best photo I could manage of it, although it doesn't do the colours justice — they're much brighter in reality and the background fabric is actually a mottled pale blue, not grey:
I would love to have one of Susan and Lucy romping with Aslan from later in the same story, or Lucy finding him in the woods in
Prince Caspian, but I don't know if any other designers have ever tackled those subjects and I certainly don't have the talent to create one like that all by myself!