Rust Red Iris - Flower Base

When I finished embroidering yesterday, I thought I'd finished the flower base.
It looked like this :


(Here's the original pattern again)


I noticed that the dark green bit on the right wasn't the right shape. It was too skinny.
So I added some fatness.

There just wasn't enough green in the middle part of it. (of any shade). Given the khaki looks so like the light gold, I was left with a single blue-green stripe down the middle.

With the "frilly bit with a gold base and light khaki top" I realised that the base of it wasn't dark enough. It and the khaki just blended together (lightest khaki and light gold are actually quite similar).

The book said "use shadeS of gold. " even though only one colour of gold was specified for this part of the flower. So I took the next darker shade of gold that is used in the entire embroidery and used one strand of it and the light gold as a double thread to sew over the base, upon which became dark enough to stand out a bit.

I did the same thing with the line that runs across the base of the flower base (between it and the stem) that is in stem stitch because I had the same problem.

I also noticed that my stitch direction was wrong - more horizontal than vertical. I figure that while I'm learning this, it's a bit like patting your head and rubbing your tummy - trying to place the stitches correctly in order to blend well. and also place them in the specified direction. Or I'm just not paying enough attention. *grin*

The direction I'd used looked fine, it just wasn't the one specified in the book. By going horizontal I had made it look rounder.

I sat and stared at it for awhile, and realized that I wasn't quite happy with it yet.

I spent a couple of hours on it this morning

You can really see what I was talking about with the light gold vs the cream being the lightest colours in my version. The cream is on the left. It's just as clear in the original in the book that it's a different colour to the light gold.

It looks a bit TOO bright on the scan - there's the tiny almost fluorescent speck there, the whole patch looks 'lit up' and it doesn't look like it blends into the light khaki very well as the bottom. It does in reality.

I realized that the overall shape of the bud was incorrect. The dark green bit and the cream ruffle now didn't match up with the rest of the right hand side of the ruffle. I don't know what is going on there. I had a stitched outline!

Anyway, easy enough to fix by adding a bit more to the right hand side further down.

And the left hand side had taken on a curve. I rounded it off again with some khaki and light gold.

This morning I just 'worked' with the colours. I added in a second green to the "green stripe" I added in more of all the colours just here and there. Mucking around to make it look right.

The strange thing was that as I went I was only looking at the pattern occasionally (mostly for the placement of the green) whereas when I originally stitched the base I was eyeballed-stuck-to-the-page to the pattern). My stitch direction changed and went vertical. It ended up looking more like the pattern in terms of stitch direction than it had before!

The effect of doing this is that the base has ended up with two or three layers of stitching and is looking quite padded. That's fine - it kind of suits it given that it's the base of the flower - slightly higher than the stem.

The one thing I don't like is that I lost the "back parts are done first, front parts done last" thing, which, in addition to the padding I've ended up with, means that the ruffle doesn't 'sit forward' like I think it should. You can see in last night's version of the base that the ruffle seems to stand out more. I'm not going to add another layer of stitching, exactly the same as the existing layer, to bring it up to the height of the rest of the base!

I did add some cream into the pale part of the ruffle to mix with the existing light gold because pale colours 'jump out' and it'd help it look 'forward'.

Somewhere along the way, I added a few random stitches of different greens into the stem so it looked a little less stripey. It looks stripey in the pattern, but not regimental stripey.

Something I still have to fix is that the pale part (that I did in stem stitch) is too wide across at the base.

Well, I've certainly made this flower base my own. Looking at it sitting next to me now, I can see where a single stitch of one of the blue greens would fit in well.

Also, I think it could do with some more blending on the left hand side. The division between the cream and the green looks very bold. I find that seeing pictures of the embroidery on the screen gives a different viewpoint and I can see problems that I didn't spot in the original, or have gotten used to seeing and just 'accept' them. I find the same thing with my calligraphy.

Here it is as a full picture :



I'm going to start on that right bud now after just a tad more work on the base.

It'll be interesting to see if I've learnt from the base, and find this bud more straight forward. It does have tricky bits but I'm looking forward to it especially doing that inner bit.