You are my Sunshine

I recently completed a custom embroidery piece that a friend ordered for her son.  I'm quite pleased with the final product.  As I have mentioned this project in several posts  I thought it would only be fair to share some pictures.  Those of you who know me will of course understand that I do not function in real time and am therefore chronically tardy.  Thus the delay in producing said pictures.  As usual, I digress... 

What Sherri specifically wanted for her son was a picture featuring the phrase 'You are my Sunshine.'  I had previously done a painting for a friend's daughter with this phrase (which you can view in our flickr group) however this piece was a little, shall we say ... girly? 

Always a fan of the children's book author and illustrator Oliver Jeffers I used his artwork as inspiration for the piece.

For anyone as taken with Oliver Jeffer's work as I am, please do further delight yourself by checking out this You Tube teaser for a movie adaptation of his book 'Lost and Found'.  The DVD is available through amazon.  Again, I digress.  Sheesh, what's your hurry? 

On with the pictures!

Planning the layout.

The fabric is 100% linen from an old shirt of Sonia's. 

Plotting.  Yes, I was rubbing my hands together and snickering to myself.

Of course.

Planning the embroidering. 

The wonderful part of the project where you look at your vast expanse of embroidery floss colours (seriously, how many shades of blue do you really need?) and hope that you're not about to ruin the whole thing by picking the wrong colour ... 

Tree trunk.

Okay, I admit - that was self explanatory. 

Sorry about that.

You are my Sunshine.

Adding depth. 

And flowers.

Well it is embroidery!

More depth and definition.

And the Final Product

(drum roll please!)

We really liked that there's some semblance of the shirt remaining in the final product; the hem line of the shirt is at the bottom right, we added the green wedge for interest and to keep everything square.  We thought about leaving the button holes, but alas, we did not.

Now for the one person who made it to the end of this post

(thanks Mom, you're a trooper!)

I hope you enjoyed this painfully long post.

Maybe I should have placed a 'time warp' disclaimer at the start? 

I did say at the start that I don't generally operate in real time. 

It's not my fault you didn't take me seriously and got caught in my digressions.

Or wait, maybe it was my captivating prose....

I'm linking to:

Note added by author 2010/04/20:  custom order fell through, picture was sold in April at the Halifax Crafters Spring Fling.  Emroidery pictures are available through custom order.  Please contact us with any inquiries.