Jazzy embroidery

I bought this top in a charity shop on a trip to Bristol a last year. It fitted well, had a decent proportion of wool and cashmere in it (important for perpetually freezing people like me) and was only about £3.

However, when I got it home I found it just a bit boring so I decided to update the look a little.  Lots of people who's skills I really admire like Elisalex and Sally having been posting great makes that they have embroidered (although weirdly when I went to look for photos of their makes, I couldn't find any, so actually maybe it's just my imagination conjuring them up) so I thought I would give it a go too. Ta da...

I went about this in my usual gung-ho manner and basically launched in!  I decided that I wanted a peacock design so went online and printed off some line drawings and basically just pinned them onto the top and started stitching through the top and paper.

I forgot to take a picture of the main design pinned to the front but this is essentially what I did with the main design too.

There are loads of embroidered garments around at the moment and ok, they will have been machine embroidered but there is no way these things should be being sold at the prices that they are, EMBROIDERY TAKES FOREVER!!!!  I had been stitching for weeks, with more time off than on, but still, a long time and this was the point at which I found myself:

Luckily I thought that the design was starting to look awesome, otherwise this would have been a seriously upsetting point; lots still to embroider or a lot of unpicking to do!
To achieve the gorgeous peacock effect, I  just used a selection of all the blues and greens and I knew that I wanted to include some gold thread to give the peacock a bit of that vibrant sparkle which makes them so attractive.  I'm really pleased with the effect but man, that gold thread was a serious pain to work with!  It shredded and split so easily, even when I kept the lengths that I was working with quite short.

Anyway I hope you're all enjoying your bank holidays (if you're in a part of the world where you're lucky enough to have the day off) and have a great week to all.