Like Honey from the Rock

After two months of no free-motion embroidery, I finally risked a little stitching on Honey today. My hand was a little sore afterwards, so clearly I'll have to work on this fairly gently. The progress I've made is probably invisible, as it was more medium values that hopefully will give the impression of rough rock textures. I'm working from darks to lights, so I'm quite encouraged to have reached values that might be considered light.

A couple of people commented on Honey in ways that made me realise they didn't understand what I was doing. There aren't any appliqued shapes, just a collage of rock images, which are being created in stitch on a printed background. Here's a detail of the lower left corner. You can see the area that hasn't been stitched yet (it's a very light section)but the rest of the shapes are created by blending machine stitching, mostly free-motion straight stitch but some areas have free-motion zigzag stitching. This is why it's been so time-consuming! Every section has to be stitched in multiple colours.