Historical Sampler – French Knot Strawberry again, and a Trefoil

I mentioned a couple of posts ago that I was laying a base of stitches for my two-coloured french knot strawberry before satin stitching over the top of it.

This is because if the strawberry is simply satin stitched, the French Knots ‘fall through’ the stitches and you can’t see them very well.

I’ve used a couched lattice on *top* of the satin stitching before to prevent this happening, and that works fine.

This time I thought I’d try a padded layer underneath.

And it worked fine as well!

------------

Yesterday I did one of the trefoils, since I had the teal thread out.

I just love it.

The colours are done as per the original.

The original was done in satin stitch, but because there were so many colours I wanted some dense stitches to really get some colour intensity going on this small motif, so I used split stitch.

Plymouth does it’s trefoils in detached buttonhole stitch, but no way was I going to do this (it fills a square of 2cm by 2cm, and has all those colours). I would have gone nutty, changing colours and dropping and adding stitches.

I did the centre vein in Lurex.

I did the leaf veins in one strand of metallic Madeira thread.

And then outlined in Super Pearl Purl.