Tu, was du willst.

I'm so terrible at getting crafted presents done on time. I like to think that the effort and end product make up for the lateness, but I still feel awful making people wait for their presents- it seems like such an anti-climax!
The Auryn needlecase was no exception- I had the cross-stitch finished in time, only to realise that I'd used paper instead of waste canvas. Serves me right for being too lazy to back up my mother's convictions with a simple google search!

I knocked up the design on my dad's old brick of a laptop- the only computer in the house we could get to run my mother's cross-stitching program, which required windows 95 and a 3 1/2 floppy disc drive. We couldn't manage to connect the program up to a printer, or export the pattern to a format that could be read by other programs, so I was stuck working from that laptop- complete with broken hinge and unreliable battery.
I was continually worried that the colours were too bright- they certainly seemed very yellow and grey against the canvas, as opposed to the gold and silver I wanted them to be.

In the end though, I was pretty pleased with how the colours looked. They seemed right at home on the brown of the fabric, and the contrast in textures was wonderful under one's fingers.
After all the work of stitching the design (and then re-stitching on the right medium!), I was a little worried when it came to stitching the design together. I checked and rechecked the order of the layers to make sure that I wouldn't end up with anything inside out. What a relief when I turned it out the right way to find everything in its right place!