Note: I have never tried embroidery before this little project - I'm a complete newbie! So...if there's any embroidery people seeing this...please be gentle! LOL!

I'm making a "favour" for my husband. A favour, as it appears, is an SCA thing. It can mean many different things, depending on the person who makes it, the reason they're making it, and who they're giving it to. In this case, I'm making it for my husband to show people that I'm his wife and he's my husband - a romantic favour :) They're usually worn hanging from a belt.

The top picture is the sketch I went with: I'm going with a gryphon because I love gryphons and...I hope to have one on my SCAdian coat of arms someday. It's holding a blue rose in it's beak because blue roses have been very special to me ever since I was a kid (and you'll also notice some blue roses throughout my gallery too!)

After I liked what I came up with, I ran out and bought my embroidery supplies (embroidery yarn, cloth, a hoop and some needles). After getting the cloth onto the hoop, I made a copy of the drawing and cut it out and taped behind the cloth. Since I could see through it, I traced the drawing onto the right-side of the cloth.

The second picture shows that I had back-stitched the pattern using black embroidery yarn. I left the rose out because it wasn't going to be outlined, so you can still see the penciled-in rose in there. It worked quite well that way :)

And the bottom picture is the finished product. Again, I've never embroidered before but...I really think I did a good job on this :)

But this still isn't done yet. I still need to cut out the cloth around the gryphon in a square shape, sew the cut ends behind, make a blue border around it, as well as making loops so that it can be hung from belt and sew a backing onto it too. So, I'd say the project is about half-done.

Oh yeah...I also embroidered each feather individually! Embroidering the wings probably took the longest to do because of this...