Grey Wardens motto - the finished product

I started playing Dragon Age in December 2014. It took me a bit to warm up to the series - not because of the games themselves, but because at the time I had to share a gaming computer with spawn, which wasn't ideal.

However, J - who is handy at that sort of thing - made me up my very own computer, and I splashed out on a fancy gaming rig, and I was all set. (I play on PC. Consoles and I don't get on.) Anyway.

Once I fell, I fell hard, and started looking for fanworks. Fic, art, some meta although I'm not a big meta person as such ... you get the idea.

Then I had the notion of doing a Dragon Age-related cross-stitch and started hunting for something. There are some nice ones out there, but not what I wanted. I decided to stitch up the Grey Wardens motto, which you see above. In some versions, the first two phrases are reversed, but I like this version better. I dug up a piece of fabric - 28ct evenweave - I believe the colour is Purple Haze. I know it's from countrystitch.com.

So then it was a matter of choosing the colours. In-game, the Wardens' armor is blue and grey. Here is a terrible screenshot to give you the idea. So I knew I wanted blue and grey for some of the words, and some kind of red for the rest, representing blood.

To become a Grey Warden, in game, you drink the blood of the darkspawn, taking on their taint, making you the only people in Thedas capable of slaying an archdemon. (That's a terrible explanation but I don't want this post to get too long.)

Initially, the red I chose was brighter than I wanted, and J suggested blending it with a darker red, so the red words are a blend of DMC's 347 and 3777. I think it represents the intertwining of the Grey Wardens' destiny with the darkspawn pretty well. The blue of the "I" and the first letter of the word in the other lines is  336, and the grey is 425. The other colours are pretty minor.

I wanted, at first, for the "I" something like a letter from an old illuminated manuscript, but I couldn't find one I really liked. Then I went to the annual Rotary Book Sale, and found 500 Alphabets in Cross Stitch by Julie Hasler, which I basically picked up for nothing. I went to the sale in the last hour and it was fill a bag for $5. It was great.

So both alphabets I used are from that book. I chose the "I" because it had the height I wanted, plus a certain degree of decoration without being too fancy. And the other alphabet gives me a medieval vibe, which I also wanted.

I was going to do a simple border, but in the end decided against it. Partly out of laziness, and partly because I think it looks fine without - although "vigilance" could be nudged over a bit more. It's rolled  up and put away for now, as I want to get it professionally framed and don't have the $ for it at the moment.

Started on September 11 2015, and finished on July 9, 2016.

Cross-posted to http://janesgravity.dreamwidth.org/