Oh Deer!

**Eeeep! UPDATE! Eeeep!**
This embroidery has been featured on Feeling Stitchy, wahooo!
You can see the post here.

Hi All,

Who's ready for a long weekend, this girl!

Speaking of long, this, this pretty deer is the last embroidery that I completed for the tea towel swap that I participated in with some of my stitchy friends (I wrote about my completed towel here). This swap, which we thought would take about three months ended up taking just over a year. Life happens...

This last embroidery is for my pal, Tara. I knew for a long time what I wanted to stitch on her towel, but when it arrived in the mail, the pattern that I'd planned to embroider didn't fit in a symmetrically pleasing sort of way, so it was back to the drawing board. Luckily, deer & stags are pretty and there are lots of images to choose from. I picked one, then made it my own. Have a look?

(feel free to click the images for bigger pictures with a lot more stitch detail)

She/he (I still don't know, can female deer have antlers?) has such a pretty face. The eyes are what drew me to this particular animal. I think this was the first time I've done fill stitch as fur. After worrying some that I was getting it wrong, I got into the grove and enjoyed it, layering the subtle blend of browns, grays and creams and imagining the direction the fur would lay in.

 I stitched a few flowers and leaves to grace that regal neck. Bold colors, bright, but not too girly, for my Montana friend.

Here's Tara's whole towel completed, and ready to go home, get a load of all that great embroidery!

With each embroidery I do, I'm always trying to improve my skill in some small way, lately, that's been working at keeping the backs neat, not carrying threads, taking care with my knots, generally keeping things tidy. On this particular piece, I thought the back was kind of interesting so I snapped a photo. Here you can see both the front and backs of the piece.

He/she's a pretty thing, I'm glad to have stitched him/her!

In my next post, I'm planning to put all of the embroideries that I did for this swap together in one post so you can see them all at once. It'll be the first time I see them all at once, too. I'm interested to see the whole lot of them together.

Wishing you all a happy weekend!

oxo,

Lisa