The embroidery course isn’t until Tuesday, but the deadline for sending in photos of our work for discussion in Tuesday’s session is tomorrow afternoon, so I’ve been working hard.

The design inspiration:

And the first, A5-sized version:

And then the same thing scaled-down to A6:

I didn’t want the downscaling to be just a straight-up copy, because where is the fun in that, so I stitched the black areas instead of using appliqué. I kind of like it because the surfaces now have both structure as well as a flow and a direction. But I also don’t like it because the speckled look does not have the same impact at all as the unbroken black.

Also I just eyeballed the scaling-down and clearly didn’t get the proportions quite right. Should clearly have used a grid. The white blank space in the middle came out too large and takes over. I’m going to broaden the black curved areas around it, to balance it out – as soon as I buy more black embroidery floss, because all this surface-filling took a lot of yarn.

It’ll be interesting to hear what the teacher and the group will have to say about this.