Finished and Framed (Finally)

After months of on off stitching and lots of pricked fingers along the way, I've finished my Goddess of Prosperity cross stitch kit by maia (anchor).

I fell in love with this kit as soon as I saw it, I'm a big fan of Chinese wuxia films (lush, epic, fantasy drama, usually with lots of death defying martial arts, magic swords and doomed tragic lovers,) and this image really brought those films to mind. In particular, a favourite of mine, I first watched when I was around 13, it's called 'A Chinese Ghost Story,' and the goddess here reminds me of the beautiful heroine, a tragic ghost spirit enslaved by an evil tree demon, seeking redemption (check it out, it's quite silly but very pretty.)

 Here are a few close ups of the work in progress, she's such a big piece that it's easy to loose the details when I try to take a picture of the whole thing. I was filling in the backstitch here, which in many ways is more fiddly than the cross stitches that make up the bulk of the picture.

Here is a close up of some of the lovely floral details which really came to life when I started on the backstitching..



Here she is just before I took her off the stitching frame and went to get her stretched and framed. It was the first time I've ever had something professionally framed, I usually just do it myself but the finished piece was long and thin and I couldn't find a frame that really fitted so I decided to take it to a framers as they could custom make the frame as well as stretch out the work and make sure it was straight etc...

I think with big pieces that take up a lot of time and that you want to last; it is worth the extra expense but I felt pretty nervous leaving her in the shop as the process took about a week and I was anxious about whether I would like the finished frame. Thankfully, I did.

The finished project on the wall...

 

 

 

 

Halfway to Heaven

I haven't been able to do much since I hurt my dominant hand last week while practising yoga. I've watched a few films but it seems odd not to be stitching at the same time.

I watched a film called 'Murder By Death,' on Netflix which is very much "of its time," with some painfully hammy foreign accents and Peter Cook pretending to be Chinese. I thought it would be a murder mystery like Poirot or some other Agatha Christie style of film. It was supposed to be hammy and slapstick but seemed to be somewhere between Monty Python, without the cleverness and a Carry On film. 

I had to follow it with the French biopic of Edith Piaf, 'La Vie En Rose,' to feel better about myself. That was good, if a little bleak. Gerard Depardieu seems to have stopped aging a few years back.

 I also watched 'Ishqiya,' a really enjoyable Bollywood black comedy thriller starring the always wonderful Vidya Balan, she's such an interesting actress to watch and seems to have a good eye for unusual box office success stories. I look forward to catching the sequel.

 

 

 

 

Well this ends week one of the torn ligaments saga, hopefully after a second week of wearing the itchy wrist support of restriction, everything can go back to normal and I can start stitching again.

 

 

 

Here are some progress pictures of a big project I've been working on, I've done over half of the cross stitches but there will be a lot of detailed backstitching and French knots before it's completed.

 

She's an oriental goddess of prosperity, another Maia creation.

 

I loved her the minute I saw her, not least because the image reminds me of a long time favourite film of mine, 'A Chinese Ghost Story.'

 

Incidentally, Xena Warrior Princess owes a debt to that film for some of its plot lines.