Happy Monday! And if you’re enjoying a three-day weekend today, double-happy Monday to you!

It’s Labor Day here in the US. To celebrate, I’m going to labor with some stitchy stuff – and a little cleaning and organizing.

But in the meantime, I want to show you the top of the wings, or the wing “caps” on the hummingbird.

Last week, we left off here:

I was stem stitching the brighter dark blue on that wing cap.

This is how the filling finished up on that:

I used 996 (one strand, in stem stitch) for the majority of the blue in the scalloped outer area, and then I used 3843 to fill in part of the scalloped area, towards the tip of the purple.

Using the 3843, I also worked some random small speckles over the curve on that filled area, just to break up the darker blue a bit.

Then, I used the same blue to work in some lighter strokes on the scallops.

Then I took out DMC 820, which is a very dark, but vivid blue.

And using ones strand of the 820, I sketched in a few stitches, in stem stitch, on the underside of the scallops. Normally, I’d add those after finishing the feathers, just as the “finishing touch” – but I went ahead and put them in now, because I wanted to see how they’d look.

I’ve decided I like them!

The front part of the wing, from the last scallop into lower part of the curve, will benefit from a little touch of darker thread later on.

So that’s the top of the wing for now. Next up, feathers!

Questions, comments, suggestions? Feel free to have your say below!

If you’d like to follow along with the Secret Garden Hummingbirds project, you can find all the articles relating to this project arranged in chronological order in the Secret Garden Project Index.