The silver lame salmon

During the past few weeks I’ve been busy with several different projects, including a couple of entries for a competition. Frankly I don’t think that either of them worked out very well, but in any case I can’t post them here in case that would violate the competition rules. Instead here’s something I’m a lot happier with. It’s the first of a series of animals local to this part of Scotland – he’s a Dee salmon (or perhaps a Don salmon, as that’s our nearest river)

The Dee (or Don) salmon

The first stage of the construction was to lay down an applique fabric of silver lame, which was then overstitched to cut back the garish shine and make the effect more subtle. The fins are also stitched with metallic silver thread. As often happens, the original is a lot better than the scan: the scan does distort the colours a lot and doesn’t replicate the shine very accurately. The white patches on the fish’s side are actually shiny silver

The only criticism I have to make of him is that perhaps he’s just a bit too realistic – too much of an accurate copy of the fish. Next time I’ll try to do more of an interpretation of a salmon rather than simply a photographic copy