Needlequest Update Post - 10 March 2014

Hi!  How's everybody doing?  Many thanks to the 14 people who left kind wishes on my last posting.  I appreciated each and every one of them.  Thank you, merci, obrigada and 謝謝！I'm feeling more like an ordinary human today for the first time in nearly two weeks, and am ready to get back down to it!  Taking a week away from feeling like I *had* to post and, worse, that I *HAD* to have something stunning to post about (!!!) was a real help.

Towards the end of last week, I managed to finish little Hanako 花子 off and here's her face and top bit.  I was pleased with this part as I was actually quite scared I was going to mess up the facial features, but they went very smoothly indeed.  I was glad that I changed to a strand of sewing cotton for the eye area details though as one strand of embroidery cotton was way too thick and wouldn't have looked anything like as good.  It's rather a pity I didn't think to match up the skin tone this way too...  Next time.=)

Here are her feet with the little sandals all stitched around to bring them to life more.

Where's the whole piece shot?  Well, frankly, you've got the best bits of it here and the photo I took of the whole thing was irretrievably blurred, so I thought you wouldn't mind waiting until I've made her up into a cushion/pillow cover to see the whole thing.=)

On the whole, I'm quite pleased with the piece, although there are certain things I would do differently in order to close up some of the gaps in the piecing and I would also make the obi (belt part) bigger, as it's rather too small.  Still, it wasn't half bad for a first attempt at this kind of thing and it's meant to be a learning process, so all's well.=)

So, that's February's needlequest up to date!  What about March?  Well, as you can imagine, I haven't got very far along as yet, but I have been working with some designing as you can see here.  The two butterflies top right are from the Hazel Everett book and I'll work them as closely to her instructions as my thread collection allows.  What that means simply is that I mayn't have some of the specialist goldwork threads that she used and so will have to adapt a bit to what's in stock.

The other design is a straight drawing of the design on the front of one of my shampoo bottles (!!!), which I thought would adapt nicely to metallic work and can be made up into a wedding card for our friends' big day in mid July.  The design will change, it won't be just as you see here, but I decided to start with as close a copy as I could make of the original and get to adapting it later on.

Here below is the lovely green silk fabric all backed and in the working hoop - just a 4"/10cm one - ready to start.  I still need to work out the threads, and even the colours to use, but I need daylight for that.  I may have time to start looking at is after I'm finished here, but I'm not sure I'm in the mood just now....

Finally, here's a throwback from the January needle painting challenge:

A friend of ours left for a year on a working holiday visa in Taiwan, so I made this into a little leaving card for her.

What about you?  Have you fellow challenge participants anything to report and share from your work?  If so, please leave a comment on this post and let us all come and admire what you've learned lately.

In a month or so, I'll be asking participants for their thoughts and feedback on the challenge so far, so please get your thinking caps on!=)

Text and images © Elizabeth Braun 2014