More goldwork dots today! But I think it’s the last time I’m going to show them to you.

You see, I’m musing about how much of the Medallion Project to show you these days. I don’t want to bore you to death with the slow progress!

And it is slow progress. All hand embroidery is slow progress, compared to what we’ve become used to with machines to do all our work. The slowness of it – the whole “journey” of any handwork project – is part of the appeal of handwork. Whipping out the Medallion on a machine wouldn’t be quite the same! And in fact, it couldn’t be the same. Many of the elements of this project can only be achieved by hand. And even those that could be achieved by machine wouldn’t look the same. So the progress is slow, and I can live with that.

But can you?!

So, I’ve been debating! Do I update every little step from here out? Or do I just show you the remaining stages? I’m leaning towards the latter.

After all, showing you 50 goldwork dots, or 5 stem-stitch-filled sections, one at a time would become a bit much, wouldn’t it?

And my poor brain can’t necessarily come up with anything original or clever to say, each time I show you the same thing!

No matter what angle we might look at the project from, the other four sections around the Medallion are just repeats of what we’ve already seen.

Think about it: I could cry “Look! It’s a gold dot!” forty more times in the process of this piece. At which point, methinks we’d all go a bit dotty…

On the bright side, I’ve moved into color lately! I mean color other than blue. The Tudor-style roses around the outer edge are providing me with a bit of relief now from blue, and blue, and more blue. And the switch to a different type of thread has been delightful, too, as the roses are worked in Soie de Paris, instead of Soie d’Alger.

These are the last major steps for the Medallion Project:

1. Finish the silk on the Tudor-style Roses.
2. Finish the goldwork: the gold threads on the roses, the remaining gold dots, the goldwork outlines of the major parts of the design (the outer ring, the inner 5-petal center).

That’s where I am.

Further updates will include only major section finishes (along with any instructional posts along the way), until the final finished Medallion is revealed. This means you won’t see the whole design, straight on from the front, until it’s finished. Will you be ok with that?

Or do you really want to see each dot?!

You can follow along with the development of this whole project by visiting the Medallion embroidery project index page, where I’ve listed all the articles relating to the project from its conception to now.