Friday, May 15, 2015

Last night's work

I decided to work on the horse-and-foal pillowcases I started a long, long time back. And I ran into one of the rare problems with tucking a project away: I forgot what shade of floss I was using for the horse, and the skein was not in the bag, so I had to hunt and try. In the end, I gave up in frustration and started in with the 'closest' shade I had, then found one closer....but I'm not going to unpick the little region of darker stuff (on the side of her muzzle), it doesn't show that much:

horse pillowcase

This is all backstitched. It's simple but I like backstitch. (The current set - the flower-girl ones - recommend outline stitch for a lot of things, and I'm committed now because I started in with it, but outline stitch is kind of a pain and it's harder to make it look good).

I'm just doing this one with whatever colors I want. There are some sort-of recommended colors on the packaging but I decided to go my own way. (The foal is going to be a lighter shade, with a blond mane, and I might do that little "blaze" in its forehead in the blond color as well. And the foal is going to have a red halter instead of a blue one).

I might do the second pillowcase with intentionally different (as opposed to "I forgot what exact shade I was using" different) just because I get a little bored with doing the second pillowcase exactly the same.

I did a lot of this while watching the very end of "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe" - it turns out I get the Encore channels as part of my package (The only one I ever watch is the Family one). I admit I was a bit apprehensive about this movie when it came out, I had read the books many, many times as a child and was afraid seeing the movie would "overwrite" the memories of my images from the books. (They did not, I still picture the White Witch as being much more like Pauline Baynes' illustrations than the Tilda Swinton portrayal).

One thing I thought last night, at the very end - Lucy leads the rest of her siblings "back home" (to the country house in wartime England) and I was like, "You know? I wouldn't have gone back. To go from living somewhere where I had intelligent talking animals (and things like fauns) as friends and advisors, and being a queen of a relatively peaceful and self-running country, AND being able to actually speak with that world's manifestation of the Christ, and trade that all for being an ordinary kid in a country at war? Nope."

Of course, I think Lewis was maybe making a bigger point there, or it was something that was necessary for the later stories, but the brief time we see the Pevensies as kings and queens, it looks so much more ideal than the life they left.....

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