Lead into Gold (A Finish)

It's been months since I had the satisfaction of a finish, but yesterday I finally put the last stitches into my version of Ink Circles' "Alchemical Romance"!  You can click the photos for larger versions...

 It's a sampler of alchemical symbols--what scientists used in the medieval times, before the periodic table and the foundations of chemistry were worked out.  With my background in geochemistry and history, I had to stitch this.

I used HDF silk in Primitive Black, Examplar Lark's Tounge, and a mystery gold color on 36 ct Picture This Plus "Ancient".  See those old books in the background?  Maybe not so well, here's a closer look:

Those gorgeous covers were my inspiration for the color palette I used.  The books-- "Die Opale"-- were published in 1907 by a great great uncle of mine or somesuch.  Or so I'm told.  I can't read them because they are written in old German.   

Sharp-eyed viewers will notice that I changed the pattern a little bit, in addition to the charted colors.  The original pattern has another symbol for gold in the center-- but I noticed after going over the pattern that there was no symbol for "lead" included.  So, because it's always the old story that the alchemists were trying to turn lead into gold (and would not succeed, of course), I tracked down the old symbol for lead and plunked it in the center instead.  In my opinion I think it gives the overall sampler more of a focus point this way as well. 

But this was a fun stitch.  Something like this that has a lot of small "finishes" packed into it was great for the busy last few months; even though not much stitching was actually getting done I got to feel somewhat accomplished fairly regularly.  :) 

And as reward I get to start something else, hee hee!  You saw it at the end of the last post--another Ink Circles, this time "Mother Maya".  Yay!