Lovebirds - Lessons 2 and 3

Hey Blog Buddies,

What have you been up to recently?  I've been spending a lot of time working on my blackwork lovebirds in order to keep up with the cyberclass I'm taking from Tanja Berlin.  It's a good thing the overall size of the piece is not terribly large, is all I can say.

In case you missed my first post about them, here is where I left off...

This was Lesson 1.

And here is Lesson 2.

It's kind of hard to see in this photo,

but there are a couple of small stitched areas

toward the top of each bird

that look a little lighter than the rest of the body.

That's because most of the body

was stitched with DMC 310,

but the lighter areas were stitched with

YLI silk which is noticeably thinner than DMC!
How thin was it?
It was so thin that I had to tie it on to my needle!

And here I thought that silk floss

was always thicker than DMC floss.

Gloriana is.

You learn something new every day!

I thought that Lesson 3 was rather ambitious,

but I managed to finish it.
I'm all caught up to where I'm supposed to be,
waiting for Lesson 4 to be published.

The colors in the body are

four different shades of metallic thread,

and the beaks were stitched with Au Ver a Soie silk,

which is a bit thicker than DMC 310.

Here's a close-up.

As you can see, some of the octagons

contain a two-color metallic square.

It all depended on whether

they straddled the basting lines,

which are thankfully gone now.

They annoyed me.

Put them on my long list!

This is a fun class,

and I like how the birds are turning out.

Lesson 4 (coming this Friday): the heads!

Hope you're stitching something fun.
Thanks for visiting!