The Blue Leaf and a Primrose

The blue leaf had to go. There was just too much ‘going on’ with the three different and ornate marigolds in the immediate area to introduce a totally different colour.
Thankyou to those who helped me come to this decision (I hate the physical process of frogging)
I still had a problem tho.

Right next to the leaf was the Sparkly Primrose, and it was outlined, and had it’s mid-line done in olive green.
Unless I did a leaf in olive green (and I decided that a green leaf was the only way to go) the greens were going to clash, right next to each other like that.
There were also other warms greens in the other marigolds.
The way to go was to change the outline of the Sparkly Primrose to a non-olive green..
While I was at it, I changed the bright orange spiderweb centre (which I always thought was a bit too bright anyway) to a light yellow and added a sequin right in the middle.
Also, it’s mid-line kind of veered off to the right a bit at the bottom.

The colours are a bit washed out in the photo – you can see by comparing the yellow of the petals in the Sparkly Primrose in the two photos.
The leaf looks a fair bit more teal in the photos than it really is. I’ve just started some bokhara couching in the long leaf in the bottom left corner – that’s actually dark forest green!
The leaf isn’t from any particular source – I’ve looked at a lot of leaves. This is of the type that is usually done in satin stitch. You can see a lot of them at the British Bookbinding site on the Embroidered Books.
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So this is the sampler so far:

You can see the big circle where that Pearl Rose that I recently said that I was excited about doing, and going to do as soon as I got all my supplies in .
Well, there are two of them, either side of the bird but I’m just doing the closest one to the rest of the work for now.
I’m avoiding those two dime sized circles to either side of the big circle. They will be in Spiral Trellis stitch, and I’m not very good at that stitch at the moment – I have to put some practise in. But I need to do them – they are rather being left behind.
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Note the two ovals, with flat bottoms either side of the bird’s feet.

These were originally drawn just as ‘swirls’ of indeterminate nature to be done in some line stitch, but I’ve re-drawn them to one each of these

which appear in a stumpwork piece in one of my books. I’ll track the source down when I’m working on them (not now, at 11.30pm)
I’m going to put a couple of semi-detached leaves above the bird, where there’s that blank space. It was never meant to be blank – I’d just run out of ideas at that stage and figured I’d come up with something eventually :-)
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It was only the other day that I discovered that you could buy coloured purl.
One flower I’d like to get into the sampler if I can is this one

http://flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=604811961&context=set-72157600455734204&size=l
- which is PinkLeaders/Lady Genevieve’s Flickr Set.
There is a wonderful piece at Boston-MFA. The completed section is composed entirely of coloured purl :

Embroidery
English, Late 17th–early 18th century
54 x 57 cm (21 1/4 x 22 7/16 in.)
Silk satin with spiral of polychrome wire (couched) embroidery
Classification: Textiles
Object is currently not on view
White satin, on which is drawn the design of a vase and flowers.
Part of the border has been worked with spirals of wire, wound with light and dark blue, dark red, violet, pink, light and dark green, yellow and brown silk.
On two sides is a green selvedge, into which is woven three threads of white wound with thin strips of tarnished metal.
Supposed to have been worked by some member of the Green family, and brought to America, in the late 17th or early 18th cent. Miss Sarah Green worked the leaf of green silk about 1778 in imitation of the old stitch.
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Gift of Miss Susan A. Grout of Uxbridge, Mass., 1888
Accession number: 88.531
If you go to the MFA-Boston and look up it’s Accession Number and zoom in, you can see the all of the purl.