Guarding the woods

When I first saw this picture, I imagined myself going out of the house early in the morning to make my way to the train station, still half asleep.

There's a small street and a square between a school and its gymnasium I had to walk across every workday. They have about ten streetlights and those lights were on the blink sometimes, quite literally, they would start blinking, mostly just one or two which was okay, but once they went one after the other day by day until they were all blinking in some kind of silent code. Honestly, at 5 a.m. I'm getting weird ideas easily and it really was a weird sensation. That day, however, I finally remembered to report it online and the next day they were fixed.
Of course it hadn't helped that the little park next to it produced some even stranger shadows than usual thanks to it. I was lucky the lady, who took her Great Dane there without a leash for a while, wasn't there at the time. Can you say Hound of the Baskervilles? It really made me jump the first time I saw that dog coming out of the dark.

And now imagine what coming across something like this creepy "creature" unexpectedly could have done to my tired brain. I can see myself screaming and running for the hills, only I can't run and there are no hills there.

Nevertheless, I love that picture and think it's sad that, according to the web, this streetlamp in Warsaw has since lost its hair as the company on whose property it is standing deemed it as dangerous for pedestrians.

The picture has been on the web for a while and keeps turning up. The last time a friend of mine shared it, I thought that I would really like to capture it in some way. In the past, I would have tried to bead loom it, but I would probably not have been able to do the vines the way I wanted to. Bead embroidery was another possibility, but in the end hand embroidery felt like the best choice to me.

At the beginning, the plan was to more or less copy part of the picture on a rather small frame as a sample to see how long it would take and if a bigger version made sense. I did the outlines first and then the flowing vines around the body and the head, and that's when I felt the need to put at least a bit of my own touch on it. Making more hair turned it into a different kind of creature to me.
From there on it should have been pretty clear that this would not stay a sample because next were hours of filling up the outlines with loads of small stitches going in all directions for some texture.

I had left the face until last. Obviously I didn't want to change anything about the glow, after all this makes for the amazing effect. Again I contemplated different options, silver-lined beads, other beads, even sequins cut in shape, all because I wasn't confident I would be able to achieve the glowing effect with embroidery as I haven't practiced shading a lot yet.
In the end the playchild inside me that likes to try out things convinced me to give it a go after all. I picked six colors from my floss, winged it and was happier with it than expected.

Somehow the creature started to change in my mind and the post on the left looked wrong to me, instead I began seeing trees. My favorite trees have always been birches, we had some in the neighborhood when I was a child and they were so pretty.
I couldn't stop myself and added one tree after the other, and then I really didn't have an excuse not to fill up what little was left of the background. Well, and then the scene called for snowfall.

When I showed my friend the first bad picture of the finished piece, she said she loved "her" with a question mark next to "her". I replied I wasn't even sure myself about "she" or "he" yet and that I felt there was a story in this that unfortunately I'm not good enough to write.
Small details of other stories I knew kept going through my head when I was working on this, for example my favorite Christmas story from an anthology I got as a child. It plays in the woods and I love it so much that one year I actually typed it up to copy it (typewriter, that gives you an idea how long ago that was) and give it to my friends.
Those bits didn't add up to a story for my guardian yet - because that's the only thing I'm sure of, that this is a Guardian of the Woods from ancient times and a spiritual world.
I'm not going to push it, maybe she or he will tell me their story eventually even if I won't be able to put it in words, but just see it before my mind's eye. Maybe I'll see something in one of my crazy dreams.

Anyway, I'm really happy with my new friend.
There's not going to be a bigger one, not only because it would probably take me forever, but also because the story can't be repeated.
I ordered a simple frame for it now and can't wait to get to get it on my wall (as far away from dem Dekan as possible!).
I couldn't resist showing it to you already, though.