Nasturtium roundel – flowers

The last bit of embroidery on this project: the flowers.

With the leaves, I used the lightest shade on the outside of the leaf and got darker towards the centre; here I’m doing the opposite, starting with the darkest shade and getting lighter further in.

The darkest shade is Madeira stranded cotton no. 0204, and here are the flowers with a row of stitching in that around the edge of each petal:

Starting the nasturtium flowers

Then introducing some shading, with one strand of 204 and one of 0203:

Starting the shading

Then with two strands of 0203:

The shading is getting lighter

And finally, in the very centre, one strand of 0203 and one of 0202:

Fully stitched flowers

Almost but not quite finished: the last little bit is to add some French knots in the centre of some of the flowers in a darker orange thread, 0208:

Completed needle-painted embroidery

And that’s it!  Here’s a close-up of a flower, so you can see the shading in more detail:

Embroidered nasturtium flower

That’s the end of the embroidery but not quite the project – I now need to cut it out and apply it to a background fabric.  That’s next!