St Cuthbert's Banner: work to date

It's probably worthwhile giving a quick overview of the design and work involved for St Cuthbert's banner, and how far I got during the first phase of the project, which should help put future work in context.  Fiona's design, based on the description of the lost original, has a central panel of white velvet with a red velvet cross on it, surrounded by a wide border of red velvet embroidered with flowers.

The description doesn't go into details on the cross, which on the original may have been very plain, but as now St Cuthbert tends to be closely associated with the design of the Saxon pectoral cross found when his tomb was opened in 1827, it was decided to base the cross on our Banner on this.

As this is a processional banner, and so will be seen from both sides when it's being carried, something needs to go on the back as well as the front.  We decided to make the back similar but simpler than the front: it will have a central cross, in exactly the same style as the front, but it won't have the flowers on the border, which will just be of plain red velvet.

So, during phase one, I made the two central crosses.  They've been put away for almost a year now, but I got them out, and here they both are:

They're both identical, or as identical as I could get them; here's one of them in close up, so you can see more detail:

That was as far as I got last year; the next step is to start work on the flowers for the border.  And there are a lot of flowers...