Wings and Cat Hair

For some reason, my cats are shedding at the moment. I’m finding that I take two stitches, remove a hair, take another two stitches, remove another hair … I’ve given up. I’ll go over the finished piece with Scotch tape at the end and get them all at once, and embroidering the minimum of hairs INTO the piece in the meanwhile.
I haven’t posted for ages. (wot? health again?). The majority of the work in this entry has been done in the last couple of days – big but easy steps.
Most of the time since I last wrote an entry has been spent on making the basics of the back wing.
Note the sequins (in two different sizes) where the wing starts to narrow. These are my interpretation of the circles drawn on the original illustration of the wing.
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I put a good 1 cm border of FrayCheck around the outside of the big front wing and cut it out.
I had my dupion selection, and I tried the wing on the Lilac background.
Ignore the purple border around the wing – that’s going to disappear in a minute.

The lilac looked so cool a colour – almost silvery – in comparison to the wing’s colour. I wasn’t sure whether to use it or not, so ‘lived with it’ for a day, and decided ‘not’.
None of the other colours of dupion were quite right either.
So I went for the forest green dupion I had in my stash.

The colour of the forest green dupion shown in the photo above isn’t right – way too aqua - but I just had to include this photo because Jasper stuck his head in for a sniff just as I tookit. We were outside on a cloudy day.
The photo below is taken under my daylight lamp and the colours look a lot more accurate :

You can just see a series of sequins applied down the right top side of the wing.
It’s a pity that I can’t get anything but glare from the copper wing veins in the photos.
The green certainly looks one heck of a lot better than the lilac ground! I backed it with muslim to support what was already a relatively heavy wing, and a lot more weight is going to be added to the piece.
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The next thing to do was to appliqué the wing onto the ground.
I tried cutting slits every centimetre at an angle, right up to the edge of the wing. (You can see them as white marks in the photo)
But no matter how hard I tried, I ended up with a couple of millimetres of purple showing when I rolled the border under.
So instead, I cut the purple border right to the edge of the wing, and sewed the edge down with tiny stitches every few millimetres using one strand of the darkest copper/orange DMC colour thread. Yay FrayCheck!

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Onto the border for the front wing …….
Firstly, I’m putting on an edge in a purple DMC thread that matches the purple of the wing pads.
I couched down a full thread (6 strands), using an extra strand as the couching thread. I found that I needed to use my right (non-sewing) hand to keep the DMC thread twisted as it kept seperating into the six strands as I couched it down.
I sewed the thread exactly on the edge of the wing, the needle coming up in the middle of the couched thread, and then going down on the inner (wing) side. There were a few split stitches that I’d snipped with the scissors as I cut the wing to the edge – and hopefully this couched-down purple thread will hold them in place.
The wing is quite raised – that original purple ground was backed in muslim, and has the raised borders of the wing pads and the outline. You can see in the photo below that it has a little height.

I’m going to put a second border line around the wing….and then it’s onto more work on the back wing….. :-)
I’m also talking to the members of the Stumpwork group on Stitchin’ Fingers about making the Butterfly body – that’s going to be a lot of fun!