Sue Coleman's Dogwood & Hummingbird cross stitch - Complete!

I've been looking forward to posting this one for a long time now. This is the big project I was working on for the better part of last spring and into the early summer. The boyfriend, who is wise and witty, payed for the framing and this was our gift to his mom for Christmas this year.

I was nervous for the month beforehand, worried she might not like it, but she absolutely loved it! Yay, I'm glad I made the right choice.

The picture is Sue Coleman's Dogwood & Hummingbird. Coleman is an artist from British Columbia, Canada and she makes lots of pictures similar to this one, where she incorporates the natural images of animals along with their native symbol. We also live in British Columbia and the provincial flower here is the Dogwood, so it seemed a fitting choice.

Please excuse the dark mark on the right side, that's just the shadow  of the camera.

The picture was stitched over 2 threads on a 32 count linen in Antique White. The background took a long time to do, but it's an interesting technique. It's created by making 1/2 stitches with a variegated DMC thread (4010), rather than doing multiple colour changes to create the shifting colours of the sky. I tried to work bits of the background as I went because I knew that if I left it all to stitch at the very end, I would quickly become bored with all that repetitive work. I think I made the right choice. I only had a very small amount of the background to complete after all my cross stitching was done and it didn't seem like an overwhelming task.

A couple more photos to show the cross stitching up close. Excuse the reflections in the glass. Cross stitch looks great once it's stretched and framed, but it isn't as easy to photograph!