Queen of Flowers - large bloom

I don’t appear to have taken any photographs while stitching the branches or buds. I think that is indicative of how much I was enjoying the stitching.

© JEC/Carol-Anne Conway

Before stitching the large bloom on the right, I stitched the remaining leaves below it as they are in the foreground. Those are the leave that were the subject of my previous post. While I had a lot of fun stitching these leaves, some of them presented me with a minor problem. They are in what I call “no man’s land”, i.e., the very centre of the fabric; an area that I cannot reach comfortably from either side of the frame.

© JEC/Carol-Anne Conway

I was really looking forward to stitching the large bloom. The flowers and the bud show case this technique, I think. As always, the foreground petals are stitched first. The edges of these petals are shown coming forward and are in the light so they are stitched with the heaviest threads.

© JEC/Carol-Anne Conway

Other areas are stitched with slightly thinner threads to shape and contour the petals.

© JEC/Carol-Anne Conway

A different colour is used for the areas that are in shadow. In the original colour scheme, which is on pink fabric, the shadows are done in pink and fade into the background.

© JEC/Carol-Anne Conway

The pink on the on that black fabric did not look right to me and highlighted a nagging doubt about the flower on the left that I had already stitched. I have since seen another version of this design on black fabric where they have used pink and it works well but I think that they used a less sugary pink than mine.

The main reason that I felt the pink did not work was that it did not melt into the background. I considered using black that definitely would have faded into the background but I thought that the contrast with the white would have been too stark. I elected instead to use a deep blue.

© JEC/Carol-Anne Conway

Happy stitching

Queen of Flowers - leaves

I elected to do the flowers in white so all of the colour in this piece comes from the foliage and stems. While I am not very confident with colour, I had a very clear vision of what I hoped to achieve with the foliage. For this to work, I needed to visualize the light source, where the sun would fall on the leaves and where would be in shadow. For those parts that were clearly in shadow, I used the deepest bluey green for the foundation. Where I imagined the sun would fall on the leaf, I used the lightest yellowy green. And in between, I used a mid-green.

© JEC/Carol-Anne Conway

The fall of sunlight is further enhanced by a technique called 'striking effect' whereby a gold thread is placed above the silk foundation before the couching threads are applied.

© JEC/Carol-Anne Conway

The couching stitches can be the same colour as the foundation to enrich the colour or they can be in a different hue to start blending the foundation stitches.

© JEC/Carol-Anne Conway

Sometimes I used the highlight and lowlight colours to blend into the mid-tones to strengthen the shadows and highlights. Sometimes I used a mid-tone to tone down the shadows and highlights. This blending is most effective when using diagonal couching.

© JEC/Carol-Anne Conway

While the shading is the fun part, the leaves really come to life when the veins are added.

© JEC/Carol-Anne Conway

With this area completed, I was ready to move onto the part that excited me the most – the main flower.

Happy Stitching