Historical Sampler- Butterfly II

Here’s the butterfly with the wings complete.

I like that I decided to make the back wings pale copper – they seem to ‘reflect’ and shimmer.

I was contemplating whether to make the body green and copper. I tried some green, and decided that it would make it TOO colourful – a more medieval colour scheme than an Elizabethan one.

So I did the body in the same blue as the wings, and the dark copper.

He got a red head in honour of the ‘fancy worms’ from the Plymouth Project.

I taught myself Ceylon stitch and started stitching the body.

Then I realized that I’d made a design mistake.

The gold stripe is supposed to be part of the body – I’d made the silk part of the body too wide. I contemplated making the ‘collar’ part next to the head wider so it would incorporate both the silk part and the gold part, but that would have made the body disproportionately thick.

As it was, it looked like he was sitting on a twig. (the photograph below)

So I decided to take out the Ceylon Stitching. (Hey, I’ve learnt it now, and I’ll certainly be using it later, tho I am disappointed not to end up using that aspect of the design shown in Lemon.)

The chain stitch on the head can be seen here. I initially used Lurex, but it cracked so much, letting a lot of the cotton core show through.

I re-did it in passing thread, which was a lot harder to work with, but looks a million times better.

So here’s the finished butterfly, with black outlining on the sections of his body, as per Lemon’s picture.

Pwetty.