This is part of a trio of commissions I completed recently. Check out American Goldfinch and Bluejay.

The Yellow Flicker has been created on hand painted silk and I used quite a lot of ink to create the darkness of the background. I used some stranded cotton thread to create the seeding and fly stitch starry shapes on the background and then some feather stitch embellished with sequins to create the pine tree like branch shapes. The body of the flicker has quite a lot of dense machine stitching and with the addition of hand stitching and sequins to add texture. It was quite tough going to stitch on the sequins as the machine stitching was so thick. Then I decided to machine stitch on top of them with a decorative machine stitch to blend them in a little which has worked very well I think.

On the starry pine ‘flower’ shape I used some lovely dip dyed stranded cotton thread to create the zigzaggy pattern and seeding and some little bronze sequins in the centre.