peacock cardigan

peacock cardigan, originally uploaded by pinstripe_bindi.

In the Embroidered Effects book Jenny Hart has this stitched on a yellow satin bomber jacket, but satin bomber jackets are a) hard to come by in my size, and b) not really my thing. So I stitched it on a very lightweight yellow cardigan.

It was tricky stitching on this material, because of course cardigans are always very stretchy. I had to be careful to pull each stitch tight enough so it wasn't slack, but not so tight that the material puckered. I think I did a pretty good job, and it went faster than I'd thought it would.

Mostly I followed Jenny Hart's color suggestions (and these colors are not true because for some reason the flash gave everything a weird purplish cast), but I wanted something with green in it for the tail feathers (she used dark gray), and I didn't have any iris sequins so I used dark blue. Oh, and my beaks are orange--hers were dark yellow, but the cardigan was a darker yellow than her bomber jacket and I didn't think dark yellow would show up.

For the eyes I used those little stick-on jewels with the adhesive base that you melt with a special tool; I've had that set for a year and never used it, and they were the right size so I figured hey why not.

The little squiggle underneath the heart is... I forget what you call that stitch; it's not cording because that's when the base is tacked down with the top stitches. It's basically plain ol' split stitch like the rest of the design (what can I say, I like the classics), but with a second color woven through it.