Isabella - an embroidered portrait

I wasn't sure how this project would turn out so it hasn't even been instagramed-- 

WHAT?! I know! 

We headed up to the Sacramento area for a week after the new year to hang with family while Matt was on a business trip. I wanted to take something with me to do... and I had pinned a couple of embroidered portraits for ever ago... though mine ended up looking nothing like the originals.....

I LOVE IT! It took hours. HOURS. I think I worked on it for a couple weeks in my free time.

 So much fun to play with thread like this. 

 I snapped some in progress shots- first I found a photo I liked and then I traced it onto the fabric and used that as my guidelines. As you can see there was trial and error. I started the embroidery with straight stitching as in my original pin and then hated it so ripped it out and did more searching for portrait embroidering and decided to go more organic with it. 

I jumped all over trying to make sure I was going to be happy with the overall look

Once I felt comfortable that it was going to work out I went down to the super labor intensive/time consuming clothing part. I really wanted it to look like her clothing 

 Here's a comparison. I was almost done but something wasn't right. So photoshopping them together helped point out the problem. Somehow her chin had gotten pointy in the transfer so I pulled out the bottom of her chin and redid it rounded 

just pulling up that chin made the whole face look right. 

P.S. If you check out my Pinterest Embroidery board you can find a lot of really neat examples of this type of embroidery.