I decided to tackle the two little funky birds that the instructions says are chickens. OK, I guess that's likely since it's a pastoral scene, but they sure don't look like any chickens I've ever seen. And they're tricky since they're really quite small.
I started by doing the feet, legs, and beaks in stem stitch as specified in the instructions. Then I backstitched an outline around the entire shapes. The instructions do not specify doing outlines of many of these detached button hole stitched shapes, but I think it's really hard to get started on the detached buttonhole without an outline, and I think it results in a cleaner overall look.
Both birds are filled with simple detached buttonhole, but the heads are worked in gold over a gold return thread, while the bodies and tails are dark brown silk over the gold return.
Like many of these shapes, working them requires a well thought out strategy. In this case, I worked with three needles. With needle 1, I laid a line of gold return thread. With gold thread in needle 2, starting on the left hand side, I worked enough stitches to cover the head area. Then I carefully brought up needle 3 with dark brown thread (then sunk needle 2 to the back), and worked the remainder of the row. . . then repeated the process for the rest of the shapes.
I'm pretty happy with the results. . . but am wondering whether they need eyes or not ???
No comments:
Post a Comment