Embroiderational Images :)

Yeah. I know. I'm silly. But!!! I'm getting the hang of embroidery!!! I'm pretty excited about this. I bought a thimble and a water-soluble fabric pen this afternoon and I've spent the past few hours playing around and practicing the basic backstitch. I free-handed a bird image and started stitching. As I went along, I started to get the feel for it and my stitches became a bit more even. My stepmom gave me some good advice when she said to make my stitches as small as humanly possible - it makes your lines and curves a lot smoother. It's not done, but I've decided to go ahead and share some pics :)



The purple craziness at the top of the hoop is from last weekend when I was just practicing some of the stitches out of the stitch dictionary.



Part of the purple craziness :) I'm actually kind of proud of this part - it's the fern stitch and I just really like how it comes out.

So there it is. The first attempt. I'm going to finish up the bird as practice and then possibly free-hand another bird on a fresh piece of fabric to embroider for reals. Embroidery is pretty painstaking, but not in a bad way (if that makes sense...). It's fussy, yes. But you get into sort of a rhythm and all of a sudden you look up and it's been an hour and a half and you have this beautiful image starting to emerge from these tiny little stitches. It's totally gratifying.