Hand-Embroidered Ferret

I have been looking at some illustrations by Jenny Hart recently and it inspired me to go out and do some hand embroidery. This ferret is from my sketchbook, a drawing that developed into the ferret toy that I made. I just traced the image in pencil straight onto some material. The stitches were thick enough to cover the pencil marks. It was addictive and I'm in the process of stitching out another character from my sketchbook.

Ferret Toy

When I started cutting the pattern out I was doing so under the warm glow of some nice orange ambient light. Probably not the best idea I ever had, as the brown linen I thought I was using turned out to be green! Oh what an idiot! So, my green ferret character here has just emerged from a river chockablock with algae. My great grandfather used to keep ferrets too, although I think they had teeth.