I spent four consecutive 12 hour days on the gold thread embroidery. Not super excited about it in the end but maybe that's because I spent four consecutive 12 hour days on the gold thread embroidery.

The background canvas is acrylic paint & pastels & shellac. Thread is DCM metallic 5282, couched with Scanfil metallic 1869. Pattern traced onto Solvy. The title is a phrase that went through my mind over & over as I stitched & refers to 'beauty'. This is an intense, long process piece & could not have been made unless it needed to be. Having done with it now, I'm keen to do more. I love the beautiful.

Landscape. Drawing with pastels and layers of paint. 

In retrospect, I hadn't really finished the landscape, I just thought I had. I get this wrong sometimes, imagine that.

Done:

The DCM metallic embroidery floss would've been much better if the scale was bigger; I used 3 ply from the 6 ply thread and I'm feeling thats not beefy enough to carry the pattern across the canvas. Thread 'line' needed to be thicker/ bolder. It was great on the sample...which was approx one quarter scale of this piece. I kinda knew this but I refused to let me remove some of the Solvy film to check for just this issue. I forced myself to keep drilling away at the bloody embroidery & burnt the bridges goddammit. Result: underwhelming. The gold thread has far too little impact as a fine line at this scale. Effort to effect ratio is tooth grindingly maddening. Trial & error, thanks for playing, on with the next. 

I love the detail shots the most, the gorgeousness of gold thread against the drawn & painted canvas.I learnt a lot from this piece so really, as a measure of success, that cancels out the slightly dissapointed-ness with the whole which is comforting.

Oh yes, those details do look nice. Those little couching stitches are about 3mm apart. No wonder it took so bloody long.

All done. Onwards.