Just the roses left to embroider. You may remember that when we looked at the colours to be used for the roses, it included a shade of pink, Madeira stranded cotton no. 0303. Although the roses are going to be (mostly) white, I’m using a bit of pink too. The stylised rose design has a…
The broom flower blossoms next. No shading, just yellow. The first fifty: And the second: Although the layout is quite formal, all the flowers are slightly different – I didn’t want the design to be rigid, and so while the positioning is uniform, I drew each flower freehand. Here’s a close-up of one set, to…
The broom flowers are to be filled in next, all one hundred of them, and I’m starting with the little green caps at their bases (I’m sure these have a proper botanical name but I have no idea what it is!). These are in the lightest shade of green, Madeira stranded cotton no. 1401. The…
All the outlining’s done, so onto the filling in. I’m starting with the stems, in the same shade of green, Madeira stranded cotton no. 1410, as used when outlining them. No shading here, just filling in the full stem in the one colour using long and short stitch. There are ten sets of stems in…
The last bit of outlining, this time for the roses. These are quite fiddly, involving three stages and colours: That pink shade will actually come into its own later; for the outlining I’m using the yellow and off-white, and the darkest of the three shades of green we looked at earlier. Firstly, the centres of…
The stems are outlined, and next it’s the broom flowers. These have a small pale green cap at the base, which are going to be worked in the lightest shade of the greens we looked at last time, 1401. There are 100 broom flowers – that doesn’t have any significance, it’s just a result of…
Annoyingly, I forgot to take a photo of the fabric off the paper it had been on when it was painted and put onto a frame ready to start, so we’ll just have to skip that bit and go straight to it with some stitching on. I’m not going to be doing much in the…
I am something of an amateur history buff. I’ll happily read books or watch TV programmes about just about any historical period, though there’s something fascinatingly ghastly about the Middle Ages, and I recently read The Plantagenets by Dan Jones, which I can very much recommend. I’m also a big Shakespeare fan. Last autumn, I…
All three snowdrop samples together: Which one do you like the best?
Having painted the pack of the finished embroidery with diluted PVA glue and left it overnight to dry, I cut out the snowdrop: I’m getting used to dealing with the fiddly shape by now! This time, I’m applying it to a green velvet background, for a complete contrast with the previous snowdrops. I used one…