Silk Purses...

famously cannot be made from sow's ears.  I showed you a painted photograph, this one, in fact;

and wondered what it would be like if the white stitching was not so white... and here it is.

I think it's an improvement... but only in photograph form.  (I notice that the colour is different in the two images, the top one is closer to the real colour).  The piece itself is too small, I think.  The curves are interesting, but the intense stitching detracts from them, rather than supports them.  I also think that it looks better on screen  because the darks look darker.

All in all, this has been an object lesson in how not to do it, really.  I admit to having my doubts about this piece from the moment it came off the printer. So...what have I learned?   Perhaps the real lesson should be, listen to the inner voice that says, there's not much you can do with this, and spend your time on stuff that does work.  Then, if you insist on ignoring it, think properly about what stitch is going to do.  Stitch is our friend... but not in this case, where it draws attention away from the important parts of the image.  I also think there's a lot to be said for working with these macro images at a larger scale; if I had done that, it might have worked better...there certainly wouldn't have been a place for that fussy stitching.

So what next?  I'm going to overprint it, I think.  In black.  And then, probably, cut it up.  But not today...today, I'm going to work on something that is working well, just to cheer myself up.