I’ve run out of the Kreinik Blending Filament I was using between the different shades of DMC, so some not yet outlined.

Don’t the wing pads look 100% better with the couched outline? Rachel Wright of Virtuosew Adventures visited me around Christmas and identified the the thread as an unusual knitted thread. It looks like that ‘pipe’ of ‘crochet’ you make with nails and a cotton reel, only with a cotton core.

It’s slightly off-gold, to go with the copper Kreinik. (Poor Jerry Kreinik, head of the company, passed away recently, if you hadn’t heard.)

I didn’t dare plunge the ends of the thread. A thick thread (thicker than any metal thread I’ve used) plunged at the edges of fraying material that I’d had to oversew several times?

Call me a coward, but I just didn’t want to make large holes on those edges. So I matched the ends of the thread up as well as I could on the top of the fabric and it looks fine, unless you have your nose to the exact spots. Not as neat as plunging, but I thought it the best choice in the circumstances.

There are also a couple of different sized sequins yet to be attached.

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The selection of silk dupion pieces to select from for the final ground has arrived and is waiting for me at the post office. I’ll be able to get it on Friday!

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I’ve started the smaller back wing.

This will eventually have some technical ‘tricks’ added to it, but the first step is to create and add the wingpads, then fill in the outline with 3 colours of reddish-copper, same as the big wing.

It’s a bit hard to interpret which shade goes where, unless you have the original illustration in front of you. And I changed it a bit.

You can see the darkest colour right around the edges of the back wing, then the intermediate colour around the wing pads and extending down the back tip. The lightest colour surrounds the wingpads.

My photo shows the lower outer edge mostly done. As with the big front wing, I couldn’t always include all 3 shades where they are shown in the illustration, because there simply wasn’t room – hence my ‘re-design’.

I transferred the outline of the small back wing to some miscellaneous purple fabric using my trusty Clover Charocopy chalk transfer paper.

I then went over the outline in stem stitch. The chalk will rub off over time.

I then created two more wingpads on a seperate hoop, using the purple shot with red dupion. *This* time I used FrayCheck to outline the edges of the wingpads before cutting them, and it was far far easier to sew them onto the wing outline without the edges of the wingpad dupion fraying.

Once the wingpads were down, I used a micro pen to mark in the borders of the 3 colours. I had trouble getting the front tip in a nice rounded shape, as you can see by the multiple re-drawings at that point.

This shouldn’t take long …. then onto some exciting stuff!