Sunburst Embroidery

So, I started this embroidery because my daily photo group had a prompt for pencils.

This is a transfer pencil- trace the lines of any image (or draw your own), and then iron the image to cloth. I didn't have any solid color cloth handy, so I grabbed the first mostly white fat quarter I could find. The pencil works exactly as advertised, the lines are nice, the design is lovely (from Urban Threads, as usual). The fabric? Well, I thought the embroidery would make the dots recede.

This one was taken for another daily photo prompt: Outlined

And I knew, almost immediately, that just outlining wasn't going to do the trick.

 Nope, still too many dots.

I had hopes for embellishment stitching in other colors.

Pretty, but still... those polka dots...

Sinking feeling about it...

From this angle, it's better, but still...

I do love the embellishment stitching however.

But seriously, it wasn't going to work.

Anyone who has taken any of my classes knows how much I love Sharpies. They are miracles in pen form. If the embroidery by itself couldn't make the dots irrelevant, then I figured I would help the embroidery along.

That's right- I colored on my embroidery. With permanent markers.

And you know what? It worked! The dots are still there, but they don't matter nearly as much.

Coloring on cloth is a lot of fun, actually.

I always love this angle with embroidery.

I don't know what I'm going to do with it, but this sunburst is done now. The dots were a mistake but they were also a fascinating experiment. All in all, I'm happy with it.