One down four to go

I hope you had a good holiday!  My son got sick so I spent more time indoors than I thought I would. The good news is that I finished the first sleeve embroidery for my Cersei gown!

This is the upper left sleeve motif. It's beading, a running stitch of metallic gold, a metallic gold running stitch with gold seed beads, bronze beads and Italian mesh ribbon couched with a herringbone stitch of metallic copper and sage green embroidery thread.

To me it looks like there are real feathers on the original gown. So I attached a few to the tail of the bird I embroidered before I added him to the sleeve, thinking if it needed cleaning I could remove the bird, together with the feathers.

I sewed it in en embroidery hoop and will use a hoop for all but one of the remaining designs. I'm a little worried about the shoulder design because I don't know that there is any way I can hoop it...but I'll tackle that when I come to it.  Here's what my embroidery looked like flat:

And here's a close up of the original where you can see a bit of the feathers on the bird's tail.

Now it's on to embroidery number 2!