Rust Red Iris - Half of the Left Petal

• Like the right petal, the left petal naturally divides itself in two. Here's the top of it :-)

• There is a shadow under that little flap. The book said to use the darkest colour but it stood out too much. I used a dark red instead, and it seems to work ok.
  

• I've got some tension problems - below the right petal and to the right of the right bud. I hope they don't stay once I've blocked the embroidery

• The bottom half of the right petal (the last one I did) looked funny to me with the mixture of light green, dark green, pink and cream. I realized that it was because they were long stitches, whereas the rest of the petal had quite short stitches as an effect of blending the colours so much.

So I took some pink and some cream and put in some small stitches, splitting the long stitches to break them up

• I'd needed to put a line up the edges of the top petal, because it was merging with the right petal and I've added one on the left to match.

• For the bottom half of the left petal, which I'm about to do, I actually took the design and marked out the different sections in pencil on the page. Those markings were already on the embroidery itself, but I found a couple of extra, including a shading that I hadn't noticed and a bit of a change in shapes.

I think marking the shapes on the design page is a good idea and I'm going to keep doing it from now on. It's really hard seeing what's happening. The lines are blurred because it's long and short stitch (that's the whole point) but where do you place that basic "cross over" line, especially dealing with odd shapes?

I think adding in this left petal is really making the iris look like more harmonized and is a big step, because it brings the centre into the design, instead of one red petal and a brown centre.

Any comments on why I have the tension problem most welcome.