Give and Take
This one is very wee at 3 x 3″. It’s based on a photo I took in my Mam and Dad’s garden on my trip to the UK this year. I was trying to take a picture of just the echinacea, but couldn’t get one without a bee doing a photobomb! So I made a feature of it. I like the way both the bee and the flower have a wing.
It’s hand-sewn except for the seedhead. For that, I did a rough background on the machine and then those pesky pointy bits were done by hand.
The bee was great fun to do. I stitched him by hand and then used the sharp end of my needle (oh this sounds horrible now) to rough him up a bit. Did some trimming with scissors around the edges, so his belly is still fat but the edges of him appear further away. There’s some invisible thread on the wing that catches the light.
As a side note, in the course of this picture I’ve learned that in parts of China, because the bee population has been pesticided down, whole villages have to pollinate their crops by hand using paintbrushes. Art imitating life in a way I hope we don’t have to get used to.
A behind-the-scenes look. This is my 7″ diameter hoop.
And I promised myself I wouldn’t make any bee puns, so I’ll quit before I give in to temptation.