Actually Finishing Things

So, last summer I started stitching a gorgeous rose from Eline Pellinkhof's book Stitch & Sew Home.

 

I started working on it in June and in July I wrote that " I just need to finish the butterfly and finish filling in the background"... and here it is about eight months later and I'm only just getting round to getting it done!

After the initial rush of excitement of working on a project it can be easy to neglect it and never actually finish it. In this case I'd stitched most of the design and had got "stuck" on the final steps because a) stitching lots of white was much less interesting to stitch than watching the pretty rose design appearing, b) I couldn't decide what colour floss to use for finishing the butterfly and c) I couldn't decide whether or not I wanted to stick with my plan to frame the rose in a hoop.

Picking it back up again this month I chose a floss colour for the butterfly within about a minute (maybe I have bought more floss since last summer??) and took only slightly longer to decide "to hoop or not to hoop".

Instead of adding some extra greenery to make the design work in a hoop I opted to unpick some of the background stitching I'd already added and stitch the original square background. Unpicking the stitches was fiddly work and took an absolute age, but it was worth it to get this project out of my WIP pile and closer towards being actually finished.

In Eline's book the design is for an embroidered cushion...

... but as I've stitched mine on a much smaller scale, I'll be making a mini cushion - maybe a lavender scented one?

First up: finally finishing stitching this pattern!

Stitch It And See

After much umming and aahing I finally chose the colours I wanted to use for stitching my floral embroidery pattern. Here's how it's looking now:

As you can see, I've stitched the main design and am now filling in the blank spaces.

I'm not totally sure if this is the right choice as I'm worried it might end up looking too busy? And that maybe orange thread I've used for the centre won't stand out clearly enough against the peach I'm using to fill in the flower? And maybe the leaves will end up looking too dark when they're filled in too?

We shall see!

UPDATE: This embroidery pattern is now available as part of my Romantic Flowers sewing pattern! Visit my shop to see all my printable PDF patterns

Pansies in Progress

I'm feeling much better than at the weekend (hurrah!) but still a little foggy-brained.

Luckily I have a bunch of simple crafty projects on the go at the moment, so I've had plenty of things to keep my sleepy brain busy. I've been knitting blanket squares, cutting out felt pieces, and stitching some pansies.

This is the third flower pattern I'm sewing from a set of vintage embroidery transfers. The transferred pattern isn't totally clear in some places so I've had to get out the transfer to see where some of the lines go, and then use an air-erasable marker to draw in a temporary guideline for my stitching. Love those markers!

I realised after I started stitching that the two bobbins of thread I'd picked out to stitch the pansies were actually slightly different shades of dark purple. They look identical in the photos, but I swear they're not in real life.

To get round this issue, I've stitched alternate lines of the "shading" with one of the threads and now I'm filling in the missing lines with the other.

I'm still umming and aahing about what colour(s) to use for the centres and what shade of green to use for the leaves but I will cross those stitchy bridges when I come to them!