African Folklore Embroidery and an ATC Challenge

In May my mom treated me to a lecture about African Folklore Embroidery. The lecturer was Leora Raikin, who is such an interesting speaker. She spent the morning taking us on a bit of a safari, sharing lots of information about animals, people groups and, of course, about the embroidery itself. She passed around so many beautiful examples of the work done by the various people groups and explained how they expressed something important in their culture or in the world around them. She also shared many examples of the work she and her cousin had done.
For the afternoon session we each chose a square of black fabric with whatever design took our fancy and some thread and then the fun began as Leora taught us some of the basic stitches used in the embroidery. What we learned was based on the chain stitch, so simple, and yet . . .

A few weeks later I saw an ATC challenge swap that would allow me to use the embroidery techniques on one of the three cards I would make for my partner. Couldn't resist signing up.
Here is the ATC that used the African embroidery using black card stock instead of black fabric:
One of the things that makes the embroidery so lovely is that the threads used are multi-colored, with the color changing very quickly. I didn't want to use the beautiful threads I had for my kit because I don't want to run out before I am done with that piece, so I used crochet cotton that I had on hand, some colored, but mostly white, and colored it myself with Sharpies. I don't know how well the Sharpie color would do in a situation where it was being washed frequently, but in this application that shouldn't be a problem.