The little project that could....

My newest textiles project that has been eating away at my brain involves a self-portrait done in embroidery. Having been an art student for so many years, the number of times that I've been instructed to do a self-portrait is too many to count, but this one is a whole new venture; portraiture is hard as it is. I've decided that because I've had the opportunity to do so many figure studies, I should take advantage of this knowledge and try to work as realistically as possible.
But I've had a hard time working this one out. All of my sketches are rendered the way that I want them to be in pencil, but I know that the translation from sketch to embroidery thread is going to be hard to manipulate.
I finally settled on the idea to create this piece as if it were a drawing/sketch from one of my notebooks. So I started by creating a college-ruled piece of notebook paper with my sewing machine. Here's a picture of the beginning:


The final piece won't include all of the loose ends, but you get the idea. The rest of the piece will be made up of embroidered versions of actual sketches from my notebooks from the last few years. I'm looking forward to going through my notebooks to revisit my thoughts and ideas from the past.