Saturday, March 23, 2019

Stitchin' Mojo

My shoulder still doesn't feel equal to rotary cutting or much piecing but I have been doing quite a bit of embroidery lately. Yes, in addition to the gingerbread house! 😊

I have just finished a dish towel. It began with a border design I ironed on from a booklet of patterns. Mind you, this was begun months ago and progressed very slowly until this past week.


The small flowers on either side of the central motifs were merely line drawings. I'm pretty proud of myself for embellishing them the way I did.


At fist I wasn't sure about those satin stitched centers in the little dark blue flowers. It looked very heavy until I had the idea to add the lazy daisy stitches to create more detail. Then I had to do something to the purple flowers above them to give them an equal amount of detail!

After I had the flowers on each side stitched I was stumped about how to handle the central flower.


Eventually it occurred to me that I'd get a nice heavy line by using four strands of floss and split stitches. All the rest of the work up to that point had been done with three strands of floss.


I added a couple of extra lines of stitching in the flower head to break up all that white space. The leaves were looking pretty nekkid by then too so I put vein lines in the larger ones. I also went back over the heart and whipped the backstitches in the same color I'd used originally. That really smoothed out those curves.

About the only thing I'd consider doing further would be some shading or something to strengthen the blue ribbon. At this point I doubt I'll bother however.



The question now is, what will fall under my needle next?

6 comments:

  1. This is beautiful, and the wavy ribbon, how neat to get that just so. More threads, that centre flower is wonderful and a super choice of colour.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I'd keep it the way it is now, looks really good!
    Good luck with the shoulder, I know from experience that those injuries can last frustratingly long. The hardest part being not doing too much when things start to feel better because overstraining it can make it last even longer. :-(

    ReplyDelete
  3. I have another question.
    Surely you're not actually going to use it as a dish towel?
    ;)

    ReplyDelete
  4. You must have the most amazing collection of hand-embroidered linens!

    ReplyDelete
  5. I love your added details Sue. While it is extremely hard to be patient, I do think you will be rewarded with a healed shoulder when this is over.

    ReplyDelete
  6. This is really lovely, I love your little details, they really do bring the piece together well.

    ReplyDelete

I'm sorry it's difficult or impossible for some of my readers to leave comments. I do appreciate your visits and the kind comments I receive.