Dog Days of Summer - Part 2

My entry for the Loading Dock Gallery's August juried show - The Dog Days of Summer - is coming along well.  In my last post I shared the centerpiece of the triptych I'm working on and the origins of the piece.  The photos above share the left and right portions of the triptych. 

The right section is embellished with hand couching.  I've done herringbone stitches over hand-dyed 5400 rayon threads from Stef Francis.  These rayon threads can be dicey to work with as they are very slippery and they unravel very easily, but the color and sheen they add are well worth the trouble to me.  I often use them in machine couching, anchoring the ends with tight satin stitches.  This time I tried the technique of threading them through a fat needle so I could plunge the ends through the fabric to anchor them on the back of the piece.  They will not hold a knot, so I used the couching thread to do several overcast stitches to hold the ends to the backing felt.  That seemed to work pretty well.

The left section I'm embellishing with seed beads in a pattern to echo the couching on the right section.  it has been quite a while since I've done any beading.  It feels good to get back to it again.  I found I had several colors in my bead stash that went very well with the fabric colors in this.  I hope to finish this beading today so that I can work on mounting the pieces when i get back to the studio tomorrow.