Colour Challenge Chinese Whisper

My next finish was something that I had not even started but it was long overdue. The colour Chinese whispers travelling page was a swap/challenge on the Embroiderer’s Guild Forum. The idea was that we all started with the same basic design, which we could modify but the original design had to remain evident. The first person stitched the design in a single colour. The second person stitched the design using two colours, that used by the first person and one of their own choice. Each subsequent person stitched their own take on the design adding their choice of colour to those stitched by the previous person. I was the seventh person in the chain and the colours passed on to me were royal blue, orange, bright green, turquoise, red and violet. I selected a range of threads from my stash that offered the closest match to these colours and added gold as my choice.


For me, this was by far the hardest challenge I have taken part in so far. I really struggled to come up with a design. I did not want to simply use the original design as a frame around a separate design but I could not see any other way of using it. Although there was no specific deadline given, I knew that everyone else had completed their pages weeks ago and in the end I felt under pressure to complete mine. I turned to a favourite book to look for inspiration, Just Flowers by Lesley Turpin-Delport, and found it in the ribbon embroidery alphabet. In the book, each letter is matched with a flower whose name begins with that letter. I stuck to that principle but changed some of the flowers to ones that better suited the colours in my list.


I enjoyed the challenge and the embroidery, and I think that it is quite pretty but ultimately I was disappointed at my lack of imagination on this challenge.

Happy Stitching