Progress has been very slow on my current piece, “The Petal Thieves”. I’ve reworked the face at least a half dozen times, but I think I am finally in a place where I feel ready to move on to the next area. My followers on instagram are probably tired of seeing the minute progress photos of this piece, I know I am! I started on the hair at the end of last week and I’ve had a huge leap in progress. At least it seems that way to me. Stitching the hair is a lot less precise than the shading on facial features so I’ve been able to work much faster. After I finish the hair I will be moving on to the underwater scene. I have been very hesitant about approaching this area of the piece. I want to represent the reflections and transparency of water, but I am working with a very solid, opaque material. With paints, especially watercolors, you can layer colors and shapes over one another and still see through them and it creates so much depth. Since I don’t have those advantages working with thread; I really have to rely on the shapes I create and my use of color in order to achieve some sort of realism. When I get to challenging sections of my work it always takes an extra nudge for me to get past my anxieties. So many painstaking hours go into embroidery and undoing mistakes is not only difficult but incredibly time consuming. When you know that, and you know that making a big enough mistake could mean scrapping the whole project and starting over…well, it’s intimidating. Making that first stitch feels so monumental, and sometimes I get stuck in my head. There is only one thing that has ever worked for me: I don’t think, I just make the first stitch, and then the second. Once I’ve done that I find a rhythm and things flow. I can make decisions intuitively and that always leads me toward organic solutions. This is definitely one of my most ambitious works so far, and it is very close to my heart. The pressure to do the piece justice is always present, but I’m hopeful that the imagery and ideas will shine through in the end.