#i may be biased in saying this but Whiterun is my favourite 💛 it was the first one I designed and the colour-!!!

[umbracirrus]

My cross stitch project of the symbols representing each hold in Skyrim, based upon the guard shields in the vanilla game, is complete!

I've been working on this on and off since August last year, and after almost eleven months I've reached a point that I'm happy with. My original plans were to give each section a background colour too, but I'm leaving that for now so that I can move on to other projects to stitch.

The finished product is 30x30cm (so approximately 12x12 inches), with each symbol taking up a 10x10cm square.

More details, including my original digital pattern and materials used (because I actually kept track of that this time unlike with my Hermaeus Mora cross stitch).

So, first things first, here is my original pattern! I used images of the guard shields for each hold, and translated the patterns into pixel art. The braiding on ones such as Whiterun and Winterhold were really fun to work on, and attempting to keep the details in the Falkreath antlers and in the Pale's pattern were quite difficult! Eastmarch in particular gave itself well to being translated into pixel art of this size, whereas Hjaalmarch... That was definitely the hardest.

Some of my finished stitches aren't quite aligned, but that's mostly because I miscounted a square or two when actually going to stitch on my fabric.

The materials used were the following:

14 count aida cloth, approximately 38x38cm (about 15x15in) (I had a huge piece of Aida which was about 200x200cm(!) that I trimmed it from)

Stranded embroidery floss of the following DMC colours:

310 (black) - Outlines, borders, details 158 (dark blue) - Falkreath 334 (light blue) - Eastmarch/Windhelm 413 (grey) - The Pale/Dawnstar 647 (very pale green) - Winterhold 444 (yellow) - Whiterun 333 (purple) - The Rift/Riften 501 (dark green) - The Reach/Markarth 163 (green) - Hjaalmarch/Morthal 326 (red) - Haafingar/Solitude

I changed needles many times throughout the process (I'm very prone to losing needles, it seems!), but I typically found that embroidery needles with a decently large eye (and a needle threader!) worked well for me. They weren't too sharp either, so didn't have many finger pricking incidents!

It's worth noting that I used 6 strand embroidery thread, though only used two strands at a time when stitching. Where I could, I tried to use thread cut to no longer than half a metre, because I quickly learned that it was prone to tangling after that point. The top of the stitch looks neat, but behind is absolutely not!!