From several feet away, Cayce Zavaglia’s portraits look like hyper-realistic oil paintings. Zoom in, though, and you realize that each portrait is entirely hand-stitched. The larger ones measure about a foot tall and 3 feet wide, and take as many as six months to complete.

Zavaglia is trained as a painter. But when she got pregnant with her daughter, she decided not to use oils anymore (what with all the turpentine and varnish fumes wafting around). So she vowed instead to “paint” with wool thread.

Her biggest challenge was getting the thread to act like oil paint. “Initially, the most frustrating part was not being able to mix the color that I was seeing so I approached the portraits with more of a pointillist sensibility. Laying down variously sized stitches in a variety of colors gave the illusion of the color I wanted but didn’t have. My stitches are layered on top of one another, which allows some to peep through and others to be obscured underneath.”