Loveday Crewelwork: Buzz, Buzz!

Most to the motifs in the Loveday Crewelwork piece are quite large - the birds, the flowers and the leaves. The birds, in fact, are very similar to the larger bird projects Nicola sells in her online shop. The larger motifs take longer to stitch and are more involved so when I come to one of the small parts of the design, it's fun to be doing something different and quick.The fly is the most recent small thing I've done and it went very quickly. The stitches used are satin, a little bit of long and short shading, back stitch and two French knots. I started with the dark brown outside edges of the body. These are done in satin stitch and needed to be done first since they "sit" behind the blue center of the body. I did split stitch around the outside edges of the body but didn't pad these areas because I wanted them to sit below the blue center part of the body.The center blue area I did pad with horizontal stitches. Beginning in the middle of the body I placed one long stitch from the top to the bottom, follow by stitches on alternate sides. After the first three stitches (one in the center and one on either side) I worked my way across one side and then the other. It worked well to come up against the wing and take my needle down to the back by sliding it ever so slightly under the brown stitches. This way the stitches were tucked in under the brown and no break in the stitching was obvious.For the long and short shaded area (after split stitching the outside of each wing)  I made sure the grey stitches on the top part of the wing were deep - almost filling that area of the wing with grey thread. On the larger bottom area of each wing I made stitches that weren't so deep but that did curve around the bottom of the wing.The next step was to fill in the blue shading, again going quite deep into the bottom part of the wing. I knew my stitches would be covered by the grey I would add but making the stitches deep ensured that the shading would look more gradual.. Lastly I switched back to the grey thread and shaded that into the blue, carrying some of the stitches right to the bottom of the wing and over the split stitch.It was then a very quick job to back stitch the legs, do a few satin stitches for the head (no outlines first - too small!), two French knots for the eyes and a couple of slanted satin stitches for the antenna with two back stitches to connect them to the head.I could hear it buzzing as I put in the last stitch!