Our house, squeaky clean

I finally finished stitching the cross-stitch of our house that I was working on for nearly two months! I mostly worked this piece on the train, and even though I made an effort to keep it clean, I still felt like it picked up a little train grunge by the end. So before moving on to framing it, I thought a little bath would do it some good.

I set up a pan with cool water and a couple drops of laundry soap (the kind for delicate stuff):

Sassy decided that this would turn out best if I had some competent supervision.

I decided to soak the piece for fifteen minutes.

Here it is soaking.

Not one to take any chances, Sassy stayed nearby throughout the soaking process.

Then a cold water rinse until all the bubbles disappeared. If only it were this easy to clean our actual house.

I knew I should be gentle in drying, so I laid the piece out on a clean, white towel.

And simply gave it a little hand pressing to gently squeeze out some of the water.

Here's the ironing set-up. Please ignore my cheap crappy iron.

Here's the back. My mom always taught me that it was very important to keep the back of your pieces as neat as possible. In a recent craft night, one of the girls mentioned that this rule goes back to the time of Queen Victoria. Not sure if her Majesty would approve of my work here, but I'm pretty happy with it.

I ironed the back of the piece, gently, on a low heat setting.

And to take you back to the original inspiration for this piece, here's a photo of our house taken last year:

And here's the illustration of it that Steven created and gave me for Christmas. I based my cross-stitch on this.

And here's the final result! I'll be framing it soon, and will post more photos when that's done. Hopefully the sun will come out again before too long and I can get some nicer shots in natural light.

I originally started working this piece as a Valentine's Day gift for Steven, so happy belated Valentine's Day, honey!