The White Horse Embroidered

In the spirit of keeping things dappled here on Dappled Things, I thought I would include something completely different from what I have previously posted. This is a project I made as a gift for my friend Kelly, inspired by her readings of Chesteron's The Ballad of the White Horse. The entire piece is stitched on quilting cotton, and the background is worked in crewel wool (Appleton brand, a real treat to work with, purchased here) in the Bayeux Stitch (a great tutorial here) of the Bayeux Tapestry fame (here is a fabulous video of the entire tapestry, narrated and translated; at 2:09 you can see a close up of a group of knights, outlined in stem stitch - the detail of their faces! They all look individual!) with a border of stem stitch. The white horse I ended up painting directly onto the fabric with a mix of white acrylic and gesso, as no stitch I tried gave me the smooth look I wanted. Here is the final product:

(see the actual white horse here)

(Details of the background.)

On the whole, I'm happy with how it turned out, though I wish I had tried to stitch the horse first, because if I had, I would have found that I didn't like the way it looked and could have painted it before the wool was laid and thus totally avoided the stress of trying to paint the horse with a super tiny brush in the middle of all that crewel wool. Lesson learned.