I’m so chuffed with my latest ’embroidery’ that it’s jumping ahead of about six other outstanding posts!!

It’s my Embroiderers Guild on Monday and that means it’s time to swop travelling sketchbooks again, so I thought I’d better get on with it! I’ve had this book before, last year, it’s theme is mythical beasts, not something I know much about really. Last time I stitched a phoenix. I looked on pinterest for ideas, wonderedfor a while about a unicorn, but the ones I saw were either too complex or looked like they came out of the same stable as My Little Pony!

I started to look at fairies, I know they’re not exactly beasts, and some might argue that they’re not mythical, but I quite fancied doing an embroidery on fairies. I saw a link on pinterest to make fairy wings, they were beautiful. They’re designed for babies and young children, but it gave me an idea….

I would make a pair of fairy wings!

I pulled out my ‘textiles’ box which has organza, georgette, sari silks…all sorts of stuff. Initially I laid them over a piece of shot taffeta, I then decided it may work better with a batik fabric behind the fancy layers. I played around and eventually came up with a length of sari silk, a couple of layers of organza, all overlaying batik cotton. I tacked it round to hold everything in place.

I wanted it a little stiffer, so I used bondaweb to attach the taffetta to the back. I traced my wings onto freezer paper, cut them out and ironed them onto the back of the wings. This gave me an easy outline to follow with my first row of machine stitches, I just went twice around the wings. I peeled off the paper and turned it over to start embroidering it.

I used a variegated blue thread to stitch veins on each wing. A green-blue thread worked well for extra colour round the edges with just a free motion sort of zigzag pattern. It still needed a little something so I stitched some circles in the greeny thread too. You can see from the back view how much stitching there is.

My original plan was to embellish them with beads and sequins, but I quickly discovered that so many layers of machine embroidered fabric is not easy to get a needle through! I just added some blue sequins with a beadin the middle of each one.

Then came the tricky bit…cutting them out! I turned them over so I just had the clear stitching outline and took it slowly. The edges are raw, I just straight stitched round, but as they are going to be sat in a book I felt that would be enough.

I stitched the two together with difficulty, in fact I just did one stitch through both sets of wings, the bow, sequin and bead and back again – that took quite a lot of effort and a pair of forceps! I added a spot of glue to stop them turning.

I am so pleased with these, they’ve been stitched in an evening and I think they are so beautiful, it’s just worked out perfectly!