Royal Owl

A few months back my sister and Mum visited an embroidery how up in Birmingahme and brought me back a stash of books including Trish Burr's Whitework with Colour. Despite the somewhat oxymoronic name, it's a great book with some gorgeous projects, but the Royal Owl really caught my eye.

I started work on this project a few days ago and I'm making good progress. There aren't a huge number of new techniques to me, but it's nice to get a bit more practice at silk shading, and I do love working with crisp white thread. I also like that the instructions are fairly sparse, so you can make some choices about how to work the stitches - I have varied the levels of padding and made my silk shading somewhat finer than the example in the book. Maybe not so great for beginners, but then I did choose one of the advanced projects.

I am using a new to me thread for some of the whitework areas - cotton a broder rather than stranded silk. It's trickier to get hold of, but Sew and So came to my rescue. It's somewhere in between a perle and a regular floss in terms of feel and texture - it has the thickness and twist of a perle thread but has the spread and softness like a floss thread. I rather like it (and works fabulously to do quick padding for satin stitch).