‘Teamwork’ bees: appliqué wings and honeycomb
The bees’ bodies have been completed but don’t look right at all without their wings, but that’s about to change, with the addition of some appliqué.
Using little running stitches worked from the back, where the full design is marked up onto lining fabric, I transferred the wing outlines to the front, background, fabric.
I want the wings to be more than just outlines but I don’t want them to be heavy stitching either, so I’m going to appliqué an ivory silk organza. They’re quite small and fiddly shapes, so to do this I cut a larger piece of the organza, placed it over the wing outline, and stitched over it in back stitch:

Stitching over organza to form the bees’ wings
With some small sharp scissors, I trimmed away the excess organza, then stitched over the back stitch with the gold Gutermann metallic thread in chain stitch, same as the bee body outlines:

Trimmed and outlined appliqué bee wing
The wings overlap, and I want them to do so consistently in each case, so instead of doing both wings for each bee in turn, I’ve done all the right wings first:

Bees with completed appliqué rights wings
After that, I did all the left wings:

Bees with both wings
Here’s a close up of a single completed bee:

A finished bee
Not much to do now – the honeycomb hexagon in the centre was also appliquéd, but this time with gold kid leather, then outlined with the gold metallic thread:

The finished embroidery
Finished!
I’ll mount it up and share some photos of it then.
I like the way you think! I would have worked the bees’ wings in the same order, for the same reason. The bees are nice and glittery, but what about stingers?
Nice. Simple and spare, but effective.
Nice. Simple and spare, but effective.