Central cross - transfer

Here's Fiona's design, taped to my drawing board. The paper was a bit wider than the board, so I've trimmed it (badly), but the design is unaffected.

I've started on some prep work, ready for the fabric arriving. I've decided to do the central crosses first - that's crosses plural, as there's one on both the front and back. I've traced the cross with a transfer pencil, ready to iron on to the linen when it arrives. This will be used to back the white velvet, and I'll go over the design with small running stitches to get it onto the front (more details on how to do this in my article, Transferring your embroidery design onto fabric).

Here's the transfer, taped to the original, which shows a bit more detail, including a dotted line a little outside the line on the design.

The finished banner will be 36" wide (as an aside, I generally prefer to work in metric, but as the description was very precise about the measurements, I'm sticking to Imperial measurements for this project), but after being printed out on the biggest piece of paper the copy shop had, it came out as 33" wide, so I'm going to have to resize things a bit, or at least spread them apart a little. In this case, I'm keeping the cross the same size as the printed design, but on a slightly larger (18") square - I needed to find the centre of the square it's in on the design, and line it up to the centre of a pre-drawn 18" square on the tracing paper. As this will give it a bit more of a margin all round, it'll give me a bit more leeway and should still look fine.