so, its very nearly spring

So, its very nearly spring. Well at least this beautiful tree outside my house thinks it is. With all the local news fuss over an impending polar chill that is set to sweep the country, I thought that I'd be best to rush outside and photograph the blossoms lest they be swept away by the winds.

I hope that you have been having a lovely weekend! Mine has involved lots of shopping (jeans, new weekend sneakers, hoodie and various other things) And while I was at the mall I stumbled upon this cooking demo hosted by NZ Masterchef's Simon Goult (and handsome assistant). They covered classics like risotto- reminding me to add parmesan cheese, cooking wine and arborio rice to my shopping list (risotto is frequently cooked by moi), and fancy sorbet involving liquid nitrogen cooking. Oooh fancy!

outlines

My what progress I have made! I am totally in the embroidery space right now- talk about working to deadline (something that I am very familiar with my line of work). You can see here that I have added the outlines for a cat, a witch flying in front of a full moon (on a broomstick of course, pedigree unknown- most likely not to be a Nimbus 2000 ;)) and a unicorn. Whew!

I can’t wait to start stitching the unicorn, which is where I can experiment with pastel tone variegated thread, rainbow metallic thread and hopefully some iridescent thread if I can find it. I’m thinking she needs a unicorn-y name- like Aurora or something like that… ideas?

The witch is going to be a black silhouette, which is why its looking a bit rough stitch-wise- especially as I was stitching a little more freehand than I have been lately. The moon is going to be flouro yellow and glow-in-the-dark thread- I have been wanting to use the flouro yellow thread for a while and now have the perfect excuse to. I’m a little concerned about colourfastness of the flouro yellow, so I’m thinking I may actually have to test it- I don’t want the colour to run and ruin the rest of my work, or fade...

The cat- also known as Pipsy- will be black and white- the trick here is capturing the essence of her face and in particular her eyes (she is not the smartest of kittys and her eyes are a little reflective of this)

embroider me a face

Well, I sort of jumped the gun when I mentioned in my last post that I would not be attempting to embroider the face on Georgie ballerina until much, much later. Turns out after completing the arms and neck, due to the rather addictive nature of this type of embroidery, that it seemed rather natural to continue and embroider her face. I don't know if I am 100% happy with it- I think the eyes are OK, there is a hint of a nose, but the mouth was met with several disasters that would have made a plastic surgeon proud. First there was a trout pout, then she looked like a Bratz doll, then she was Bratz-doll + smiley-face, and now simply a smiley-face smile. I was trying to capture a level of innocence appropriate for a young ballerina on this embroidery. I am not entirely sure that the face 'works'- I think its cartoony in a slightly wrong way and looks out of kilter with the work that went into the dress and the body. I am tempted to fix t, but my common sense is telling me not to touch it for a long, long time...

Anyway... here's a bit of step-by step:

Adding the shading- you can see that I embroidered the cheeks and then added satin stitch shading in a darker flesh-tone. Here I am adding the lighter flesh tone.

With all the base shading added. I was slightly creeped out by this...

With eye, nose and a smile!