Embroidered Peacock - A drawstring bag

As a part of Red Work course at stitch map, I had to stitch a draw string bag to hold my pattern weights. I chose the peacock motif for this bag for two reasons  -

I wanted to choose one which were not stitched by any another stitch map member so far.
I have a huge peacock pattern with me for the past 2 years which I wanted to try out on a bed sheet sometime this year ( or next year).


Here is a close up picture of the peacock motif

I have used 2 ply of floss across the peacock. 

Peacock Body part	Stitch
Crest Tip	Detached chain / Lazy Daisy
Crest Lines	Back Stitch
Body outline and filling	Stem Stitch
Wings Outline	Chain Stitch
Wings Filling	Outline Stitch
Beak Filling and Outline	Fly Stitch
Legs	Fly Stitch
Feathers Outline	Chain Stitch
Feathers innerpart Outline	Whipped back Stitch
Eyes	French Knot (3 Wraps

I did not get it right and beautiful this peacock motif at the very first trial. I had to remove the stitches some 2 or 3 times, to get the right look.  Thanks to my mentor Anita .  She really encouraged and suggested me some tips to get this peacock right.

My initial version of the peacock was this above picture.  I managed to use only cool colors blue and green. This was kind of  very dull looking - especially the eyes done in light blue floss..

Anita suggested me to use black floss for the eye and to use a hint a bright yellow in the feathers.  The yellow contrast worked the magic in this peacock and it made the peacock little more lively.  I also wanted to do the legs in black as the light blue floss on a off white fabric made it very dull.

After this rework, my peacock looked like this

Again after this rework, we both were not satisfied.  I wanted to remove the light blue floss entirely and use black instead.  So, I removed those stitches and did it again with black crest lines, dark blue crest tip, dark blue beak with a hint of yellow in it.

After all these rework, this is my final peacock. I was finally satisfied with the outcome after making the changes Anita suggested. Thank You Anita.

Pattern Weights

As a part of stitch map Red Work course, I had done all these pattern weights. For the past two and half months I was completely into this Red Work Course and was focussing on completing it within the end date.  The Red Work course was a great course, which covered the very basics of embroidery - like how to wrap the hoop with the fabric, how to do knotless embroidery.  The stitches covered in this course were the basic stitches like - running stitch, back stitch, split stitch, outline stitch, stem stitch, seed stitch, feather stitch, chain stitch, detached chain stitch, blanket stitch .  I have also made a draw string bag to hold these pattern weights. More  on the embroidered draw string bag in a separate post soon.