Embroidered Book Cover - Strawberries Finished, and Couching, couching, couching

Top left strawberry : Laid and couched. I really like this technique - it's textured, but subtle.
I had to do a bit of thinking to see how close to lay the top threads.

Top right : This has a trellis on it. So - the two strawberries do look very different. The tension on the couching isn't quite right - the lines of the trellis look a bit loose.
Long and Short stitch underneath, in two reds. You can see a bit of a highlight in the top right corner.

Bottom : Detached buttonhole - first attempt. I found this one heck of a lot easier than the trellis stitch. (I'm not going mad, am I? You lay a trellis, but you also do trellis stitch, and they are totally different).
Finding it easier, of course I like it a lot more.

I haven't done sepals for them. I want to do woven picots, but doing such small woven picots might be a bit of a stretch. I'll have to experiment. I didn't want to leave gaps for the sepals at the top of these strawberries when it was my first time dealing with laid & couched, a trellis and detached buttonhole, and I didn't want to deal with shapes even more non-rectangular than the strawberry shape itself in laying the couching and adding/dropped stitches.

I'll probably end up doing chain stitch sepals, like I did for the trellis stitch strawberry.

The uneven French knots are gone - I'm thinking about not putting French knots on these 3 at all, to show off the textures of the strawberries.

The Light Effects Stranded gold DMC finally arrived a couple of days ago. I found that it didn't match what I'd used on the front cover - which was a mysterious thread in a tangle that had lived there for years - but oh well. I can't go out to match threads.

I have one heck of a lot of couching to do around the outsides of the elements (one on the front cover too, as well as some edging).

The couching really brings out the carnations, and that one has light edges and the other dark.

I'm kind of at a point where design mistakes are really annoying me. The design isn't traditionally Elizabethan - but I'm just beginning, and also I'm dealing with small areas of a square (the front) and the long rectangle (the back flap). To get proper spirals in, I'd have to do awfully small elements hanging off them, or do partial spirals or something.

But it is my first piece, apart from that sampler I did where I was learning satin stitch.

I have an awful lot of couching to do *grin*. All around the edges 3 times as well as the elements!