Honoring Bud and his Piranha

This project started out as one thing and turned into something much more meaningful. 

Many years ago my mom use to help with our local EAA newsletter and years ago, she sat down with Bud Pinkston to talk about his Piranha and to get some tips and tricks from a flight instructor to add to other issues of the newsletter. She recorded those visits so she could get the information right when building the newsletter and to be able to refer back to them when she needed content. She had saved those and had recently come across them and wanted to give them to Bud and his family. Over the years Bud and his family became very dear friends of our family. 

We were sitting at lunch and she asked if I thought I could embroider his plane on a tote bag to put them in. That afternoon she sent me the picture that she had hoped to use. The picture needed a little editing to remove shine and glare from the plane, that afternoon I sent it to my digitizer. (the person who I rely on to turn my flat pictures into the brains behind the operation of what tells my machine what stitches to put where!) 

less than 12 hours later I got the embroidery file back from my digitizer but was not able to do a test stitch with it until later that day. I had errands to run so it was several hours between the time that the file came in and I sat down in my sewing room to start working with it and picking and pulling thread colors. I had just opened the file and started pulling colors when I got a phone call; that call changed the course of everything. 

Bud had been involved in an accident a couple of days prior and had opted against having surgery that would be difficult to recover from at his age, instead he opted to go home and utilize hospice. 

This changed the entire direction of this project. Having the design ready to stitch, I quickly stitched out a test stitch to make sure I had chosen the right thread colors, when an idea hit me of doing something other than a tote bag with the design. 

I modified the design slightly and opted to stitch just the airplane on window screen; which would give it the illusion of it flying. And would change appearance just by where it was hung. The magnitude of how that turned out did not hit me until I took it outside and hung it on my front porch and took a picture of it.