Don’t ask me what I’m drinking when I come up with these post titles.

Owls!

My ongoing project to embroider miniatures of all the great woodland fauna continues. Aren’t owls like Mother Nature’s gift to doodlers? Two big circles and a triangle = Owl face.

I love Barn Owls. They look so different to other owls.

I tried a number of different stitches with him; The eyes and surrounding stitches were familiar split stitch and satin stitch, but when it came to the face and it’s feathers I wanted to get a bit more free-form, so built up the texture with layers of fairly random, well I guess you could call it sort of running stitch, sort of free-form satin stitch, sort of elongated seed stitch? I was using single stranded cotton for this bit.

Framing the face he has these rounder, thicker looking feathers which I replicated by using 2 strands of cotton, and a simple back stitch but working layers on in a brick-type alternating pattern.

I finished his head with reverting to split stich, and then a little dusting of grey seed stitch on the top, to show his colouring.

Then I made this funny face:

You can see the way the piece is made up better with this one with all the different colours. I think he is a Brown Owl.