The theme for travelling book (pages) this month was ‘Windows’, so plenty of scope there. My second travelling book’s whole theme was ‘Stained glass windows’, and some wonderful work went into it, with lots of ideas for further development.

But no, what popped straight into my head were eyes, the windows to the soul. On several occasions I’ve tried to take some really close-up photos of eyes, without much success; particulary bad were the first selfies, trying to take my own eye.

I’ve tried the phone and the iPad, tried my own eyes, Colin’s, Miles’ and Lera’s, got Colin to try mine, all to no avail. Alex tried last week for me (better), but too many reflections – next door’s house and garage and the window frame.

Then I tried with the macro setting on the bridge camera, me taking Colin’s eye.

And Colin took mine, but far too many wrinkles. I’m not used to seeing myself so close-up.

However, once they were cropped I’d got something to work with.

So far, I’ve done my own eye, because there’s more variation in colours to play with.

I’d originally thought about doing silk shading, and doing several. Then I decided that one bigger iris would be better on the A5-size page. It’s 7cm (3 1/4 inches) in diameter, so it meant a lot of stitching and not a huge amount of time.

I thought it was a good idea to put some background colour in first. I started working with the soft cotton, really tight in a small frame, and dampened Derwent Inktense pencils, making radiating lines between the inner and outer circles, adding more and more colours.

I used a charcoal grey for the pupil, leaving a tiny bit of the white fabric showing.

Then I strengthened the colour around the outer edge of the iris.

I was really pleased with the finished result, but thought I’d better put some stitches in, from a selection of possible threads (but not the reds and corals, of course!).

I did straight stitches of varying lengths, echoing the pencil marks radiating outwards in three or four different shades of green and greeny blue.

Then I did varying length stitches around the outer and inner edge of the iris. The yellow is a subtly variegating slightly thicker thread with a few green stitches mingled.

I now need to stretch it over some mount-board, do some print-outs of photos of work in progress and a colour-chart of the pencils….. and today, so I’m not last minute again tomorrow morning!