Favors in progress

 So the latest thing I've been working on are some favors. Just after Pennsic, I became a student to Maestra Lucia Elena Braganza and, being the sort who likes making things, decided to embroider up a couple of favors using her heraldry that we as her students and apprentices could possibly use.

Enter The Sun In His Splendor. Oooh ahh.

I found some clip art of a sun that I liked and reduced it to the right size. Thinking on how to best get the pattern onto black linen, I thought this might be a good opportunity to try out a technique called Prick and Pounce where you basically poke holes along your design then use a powder (chalk, charcoal, that kind of thing) to transfer the pattern.

It sort of worked. Maybe I needed bigger needle or, as I saw suggested one place, I could have sanded down the back to smooth out the paper and allow the powder to get through better. Found some white ink pens to join up the dots. One turned out better than the other because I chose to do that one a little differently. I took my white pen and poked that through the holes to get the pattern on the other side instead of the powder. Worked a little bit better.

Next to the stitching. I want these to be fairly sturdy so chose to use DMC cotton. For the first one, I tried DMC cotton perle size 5. That didn't work as well as I'd hoped. It's also been a while since I did free form embroidery so it took me a while to get back into the flow of doing stem stitch. The perle wasn't great for the split stitch either. The black outlines were added afterwards, just backstitch over the top. All in all, I'm not terribly happy with how the first one turned out so I am trying to decide if I want to pick it out and redo it.

For the second one I took a different approach. I decided to try the DMC floss. Already much better. I did the black outlines right away and my stem stitch got much better after the practice. What fun doing black on black! Haha, but it is much better as you can see. The split stich looks a lot better with the floss also and I am much happier with this one.

Poking the pouncing holes into the pattern. That's my needle sticking in there.

Tilted the paper so you could see the holes.

After pouncing the first one and starting to try to trace over the lines. Not great.

Managed to get the pattern drawn out, but isn't very good. A lot of things are "off".

This is the second one. I just poked my pen through the holes in the paper pattern and it was much easier to see and connect up.

Started on the first one. Filling in the center with a spiral of stem stitch. It's been a while so my stem stitch isn't great at this point.

Stem stich for the center. Stem stitch outline on the straight rays with sort of a klosterstitch fill. Tried a split stitch outline on the wavy rays. It just all seems clunky and I think that's the cotton perle.

Finished up filling the wavy rays with more split stitch. Yeah, clunky.

Adding on the black outline. Not great, but I think it is helping.

Outlines finished and face added. He's a little derpy but kind of cute. Just not happy with this one. Not how I was envisioning it.

Starting on the 2nd one. Switched from perle to floss. Much better. Stem stitch much improved. Black on black is fun.

Black stem stich outlines and details which are hard to see yet. Filled in the center with split stitch. Working much better with the floss. The straight rays are outline in stem stitch again and filled in with split stitch.