Sister Artists Butterfly

 
Time for me to start working on the Sister Artists piece I need to do.  I have received these really great hand-embroidered butterflies (and one bird) made by women artists in Uganda. They're all done on white or cream fabric, and I need either a blue or green background to make the quilt work that I want to make with them. The white is just too high contrast.

I started out with some sky blue Tsukineko ink all around the butterfly, the ink wicked up through the fabric pretty quickly. I added it a small distance away from the embroidery so that it didn't change the thread color too obviously.

Then I added some "orchid odyssey" aka lavender.

That mixed together pretty well for a nice sky effect so I put in a bit darker of blue with Cerulean blue.

Here's how it looks after it's dried overnight. I like the look of it much better now, it'll be so much easier to incorporate into a quilt without the glaring white background. And even better the ink didn't affect the embroidery threads.  Now to do the other embroidered pieces in a similar manner.