Well, I've completely taken apart the skirt. Took me about 2 hours while I watched the first two episodes of The Tudors on SurftheChannel (let me tell you, a complete LIFESAVER when all you have to watch is AFN). I'll post a photo of the deconstructed skirt later if I remember to take one.

After deconstructing the skirt I marked out some pieces for Ronee's wallet and added in seam allowances and such. Once I had the general outline made I set to work on embroidering the tattoo heart onto it.

I printed out a photo Ronee had of her tattoo on her MySpace to use as the pattern but because of the way the photo was taken, one side was straight but the other angled away. I traced the straight side with a black pen, folded it and scanned it into my computer. Then using PSP I copied the image, mirror flipped it and put it back together to re-create the original design. Here's what I ended up with (note that the lines down the middle were simply a guide for me to see where the mirror image was reversed, it is not in the original drawing:



I then printed it up and used a pair of scissors to cut out the white bits to use as a sort of stencil. Now if I'd had an X-Acto knife or something of the sort this would've been a whole lot easier. As it was I cut out the farthest outlines, traced them onto the back of my leather suede piece, trimmed into the next outline, traced and repeated. So instead of my stencil having a bunch of open spaces within it like lace, I just kept making the stencil smaller and smaller as I cut off the outer bits working my way into the center. I know that's kind've confusing to imagine. Anyways... here's my pattern as it was drawn out onto the suede. I also "colored" in sections to give me an idea of how I wanted to break up the image into several different colors (the original tattoo is all black):



Moving on, I had previously chosen three shades of blue Venus floss at the local fabric store (2458, 2462 & 2464 for anyone wondering) to use for this project. I got those out and set to work... here's the photos of my work in progress and the finish. Took me just about all day to do, so I figure about 6-8 hours of stitching. It's all satin-stitched by hand (which by the way, on leather... hand-sewing really really REALLY sucks!) and I'm still debating on whether or not I should outline everything in black floss to "hide" the uneven stitches.

Anyway, on with the photos! I took photos of the fronts and backs... since the pattern was drawn on the backside I mostly worked from there, flipping the work over periodically to check that the stitches were covering well enough on the right side.













I'm hoping to get the wallet done tomorrow as well as a few other accessories that I have planned. ^_^