Ever since Friday afternoon, I’ve had a song stuck in my head. It goes something like this, to the tune of “On the Road Again”:

The Green is Done. I’m so happy that the Green is Done. It took forever to stitch all that Green. But now it’s over and the Green is Done…

It doesn’t really work rhythmically with the song, except in my own tuneless, rhythm-less way of singing.

Are you glad this isn’t an audio-blog? (Trust me, you’re glad…)

There it is. Green. Finished.

I still need to finish up some yellow outlines, and I need to remove some old dark green outlines stitched in a while ago and replace them with yellow.

But, when it comes to the intense stitchery, the leaves are, for all practical purposes, finished.

Whew! That was fun!

Here are the last leaves, closer.

It’s funny how, in photos, the leaves look completely different, depending on the angle of the photo.

Some leaves that aren’t really all that dark, look very dark. And some leaves that aren’t all that light look very light.

In any case, the leaves are finished.

The next immediate step is to finish the outlining in yellow around all the leaves, and then…the Flowers!

And now that the leaves are done, I feel a little more comfortable dabbling with some variations with different threads. Do you remember, I spoke of doing a silk version, a whitework version, possibly a goldwork-excerpt version? Well, the scope of the project is really quite huge, and to undertake it three or four times is probably a bit insane. Still, I have plans to play with other mediums and techniques, at least with parts of the design.

I want to try something somewhat weird with a silk version. And I want to dabble with a bit of whitework, too, so that we can see more clearly how a design can be interpreted in so many different ways with embroidery.

Don’t you just love embroidery? There are ever-so-many possibilities with hand embroidery, that you could never, ever get bored with it! Right?

Onwards and upwards, my friends!

If you’d like to follow along with the Secret Garden Hummingbirds project, which features a design from “Secret Garden: an Inky Treasure Hunt & Coloring Book” by Johanna Basford, you can find all the articles relating to this project arranged in chronological order in the Secret Garden Project Index. Among the articles, you’ll find plenty of tips and techniques that will help you with your own embroidery projects.