Slow Sunday Stitching - April 23, 2023

First of all, I've skipped #24HoursOfCrossStitch this weekend.  I just had too much going on.   We had a pretty severe thunderstorm come through last Wednesday (though we missed the tornadoes that hit further south) and I had a couple of limbs come down onto the porch roof.  They were small, about an inch and a half, so no real damage.   But I did have to get the tree guys to come by.  I'm FAR past being comfortable on a ladder a story up in the air!!

Also, I left it too late to get vacation day on the calendar for Friday, but I do have vacation days already scheduled for the middle of May.  I'm not planning any travel, so I'll do a stitching marathon for the start of my vacation - perfect!

That said, there was a good amount of stitching accomplished this week.  I worked on both the travel project (the perforated paper Santa with dogs ornament) and the Sugar Skull (460 plus stitches this week).  I should have enough progress to do pictures on both soon.  But the main focus project was "Majestic Eagle", my vintage crewel kit.

The chest and head of the eagle is done!  I think it came out looking pretty decent, especially considering the time gap between the upper part of the grey area and the remaining stitching.  

As I thought, I'd built up the difficulty of the project in my head and it turned out not so bad.  I found a good reference photo of an actual bald eagle in a pose very close to this one, and tried to indicate the density and direction of the feathers with long and short stitches, split stitches, and "Pueblo" stitches (a variant of the split stitch); I think it's very effective.  This section only took me to the four hour mark on this ten hour rotation slot, so I needed to decide what part of this picture to work on next.  

When I started this project, it was my first actual crewel project and I'm self-taught in this technique.  This project is on the larger side - 16 x 20 inches (41 by 51 cm) and has almost 20 colors.  (Yes, as usual, I jumped in the deep end LOL).  When I was learning embroidery from my grandmother as a young girl, she always had me work all of one color before moving on to the next, that's what I started to do here.   Sort of.

But I have found out since then that the best practice for crewel embroidery is to work motif by motif or in a picture like this one, area by area.  The general rule is 'back to front'; so things in the 'background' that will be overlapped by things closer to the viewer are done first.  The exception is if the stitches in the background might be damaged if they are worked first, one always does any fragile stitches last (i.e. the long pine needles since they would be at risk for snagging).

I have partially done 'stuff' everywhere on this piece, the only parts that are completed are the bark covered part of the branch, the feet, and (recently) the head area. So I think I'll try to get the right wing done next since it's 'behind' the larger 'forward' wing and quite a bit of it is finished already.  I've kind of painted myself into a corner in the center of the secondary flight feathers of that wing.  You want a crisp line on the edge of the feathers that are on 'top', so it will be a bit tricky to get the stitches in that section to lay correctly.   Then the rest of that back wing will need to be worked from the top 'leading edge' of the wing down to the smallest tertiary flight feathers just above the tail.  (Those are the bottom two feathers that are completely worked already.)  The 'covert' feathers at the base of the wing are either finished or out of sight behind the left wing that is raised in front.  The only other place that is problematic is the where the next to the last of the primary flight feathers overlaps the first of the secondary flight feathers (the orange one in the center) - another point where I'll have to watch carefully so I don't destroy the line of the 'front' feather that's already stitched.

Also, did I fall down an internet rabbit hole researching the names of the different types of feathers on eagles?  Did it send me on a wild goose chase into Medieval falconry?   Yes.  Yes it did.  😁

Linking up with the SSS crew (this week's roundup).