Warrior shorts

I found a book of Scottish stories of the feats of Finn MacCoull for my grandson Fionn for Christmas. It has wonderful pen sketch illustrations, including one of the warrior Fionn MacCoull standing on the sea-shore defying a monster. As soon as I saw it I thought it would make a great embroidery on a pair of jeans or shorts.

I photocopied, enlarged, traced and simplified the illustration, then transferred the result to a water soluble stabiliser. As much as I prefer to work directly on the fabric, the dark, heavy denim makes that very difficult.

 I worked the basic outline using the stabiliser, then removed it and improvised the rest.

The illustration has a great sense of storm, wind, defiance and power that I wanted to capture in the stitching.

The hard thing was knowing when to stop - to leave it as a sketch, rather than fill in every part and risk losing the sense of movement.

Fionn recognised it immediately as a warrior (phew!).

I like embroidering denim in this way and it makes a good boy present.