2nd Go

After that first set of stitches, I decided to do something a little more cohesive--a general design picked out in white thread, and then filled with a variety of colors and techniques. I drew a little bit of this with a pencil, which got graphite all over my white thread. After that, I just went totally freehand, sewing the design directly on the unmarked linen.

But then after many, many, many hours of poking away at this, I decide it might be a little too ambitious. Especially as my skills with certain more complicated stitch patterns were lacking non-existent.

This was abandoned in favor of a few smaller practice bits. Sometimes I get too excited about a new thing, and forget that I'm new to it, and don't need to shoot the moon the first time.

By the way, if you click through to the larger size of this picture, you should be able to enlarge it even more from there. Possibly to the point of too much detail. The yellow sort of diamond-shaped bit shows particularly well my lack of awesomeness at this point.