Portraits, feathers, and collaboration

It's been one of those weeks when I've done nothing but stitch- in other words- a good week. I've been feverishly trying to finish the portrait that has been a UFO for a year. I think... maybe... I can call it done. There are a few things here and there that bug me, but are mostly due to the inaccuracies of my initial applique, not the intense stitching that went on top of it. I can't bear to tear out stitching. Most of the piece is done in seeding and chain stitch. It's a bit awkward working from a sepia photo of a person you've never met.

 My Stitch and Surface class kicked off last week and everyone seemed very happy to get to make a feather for Jude as a way to jump into our 10 weeks of stitching.

 These 2 are my contributions. I made them both on a patch of the 4-squares from my great grandmother's stash. The top photo is of a ring of 4 in Jude's Magic feather style (but in some bright colors). The ring of 4 got me thinking about cyclical time and how I was stitching on something my gran stitched on too.

 The single feather is a little more my style. I've been finding a lot of feathers outside the past few mornings. There was a nice pigeon feather on the sidewalk this morning that I'm recreating. It's almost done. Hopefully my students will have all theirs finished by tomorrow night and I can wing them off to join the others over at Spirit Cloth.

 It's exciting to participate in collaborative projects- especially when they come through this technological medium of the internet, something that sometimes seems cold and impersonal, but which enables the world and our sphere of influence to shrink to something comprehensible and more human.

Speaking of collaborations, the collaborative stitch bombing project got some love over at Craft Gossip. Thanks everybody! PS: the piece of glass at bottom right in the photo was affectionately dubbed "the breast"- it was the bottom of a wine glass with just a nib of the stem sticking out and looked just like a nipple ;)