Embroidered Prayer Book Cover

A couple of years ago I decided my prayer book hymnal really needed a cover.  It's my every Sunday prayer book with all our services and hymns so it gets quite a bit of use.  And it's always been a bit fragile ever since Bullett ate it when he was a puppy.  A bookbinder friend repaired it for me but there was nothing to be done about the missing pieces of binding.  Anyway, I decided to do an embroidered cover for it.  The background fabric is a navy blue satin weave fabric that has a nice subtly turquoise iridescence in person. 

I was inspired by the voided monograms over on Needle n Thread (my favorite embroidery blog).  I marked out some faint outlines and started stitching!   It's all worked in standard cotton embroidery floss, mostly with two strands at a time.  

I hadn't really been working on it for several months, but during the stay-at-home orders this spring, I worked on it through many many zoom meetings, so I was able to make lots of progress.

The embroidery wraps around the back, mostly flowers and vines and leaves, but a there are a few small butterflies and dragon flies, as well as a slightly larger bird and mouse.

This is the completed embroidery.  The words around the edge come from one of our Eucharistic prayers and are meaningful to me.

Here's a close up of the bird.  He's pretty small, about 2.25" long.  My shading could use some improvement, but I think he came out cute!

The mouse is about the same size.  I was using all stash thread, so didn't have quite as many colors for the shading as I'd have liked but cute all the same!

And here it is turned into the book cover.  The Chi Rho isn't quite centered on the front, I actually think that element was a bit too big overall, but otherwise I'm really pleased with how it turned out.  Of course, now I have an embroidered prayer book cover with many many many hours of embroidery-  in retrospect probably not the best choice for such an oft used book that goes in and out of my choir bag with such regularity, but it makes me happy to have something so pretty to cover such an important book.