Chicken Reading Book Embroidery Design, Instant Download

Its a chicken. With glasses. Reading a book. 8 colours, 5 sizes, and its somehow the most serious-looking chicken youve ever seen.

The body is almost perfectly round, that plump compact shape you get on cartoon birds when the artist is going for maximum fluffiness. Every feather gets its own individual treatment, long directional satin strands radiating outward from the centre so the whole bird has a wild halo of tan and gold plumage. Head feathers are especially mad, sticking up and out in every direction like the bird got a fright mid-chapter. Perched on the beak are large circular glasses, big lenses, thick frames, the kind an absent-minded professor would wear. Red comb sits up top in solid red satin, and the wattle hangs below the beak in matching red. Two golden-orange feet stand flat on the ground, claws just about visible. The book takes up the lower half, open flat, dark navy-grey pages in a tight fill that reads as printed text at a glance.

Stitch count is 19k at the smallest and 44k at the largest. Thats all feather stitching, its what takes the time, all those directional passes in the plumage, but the result looks genuinely impressive stitched out. One customer ordered last autumn and she told me she made a small run on canvas tote bags for a book fair and they sold out in two hours. The glasses frame uses a single colour which keeps the face from getting too busy.

Use flat medium-weight cotton or canvas. Avoid stretchy fabrics because the individual feather lines can shift out of registration on jersey. Use a firm cutaway stabiliser, float a layer of water-soluble topping if your fabric has any surface texture, and hoop firmly. Message if the plumage colour looks muddy, sometimes golden-tan threads vary and you may want to swap to a brighter gold for more punch.