A Little Ribbon Embroidery

I've had a couple of Crafty Ribbons kits in my kit drawer for a while now and have been meaning to get them worked up.  However, when looking at the designs, I couldn't help but feel that the best hadn't been made of its potential.  This is the 'original', what do you think?  You get a small square of black fabric to work it on and, yes, it's plenty big enough for the design, but really nothing like big enough to put in a hoop.  In fact, although this is my fourth kit of this brand, I've never once used the fabric supplied in the package owing to its over small size.

I decided that the first thing to do was to create a new background and, as I had three small projects in mind that I wanted non-plain backgrounds for (including another kit by CR, the colour choices for which make me wonder how they could bring themselves to put it into production....), I decided to have a go at a bit of painting.  Below are the materials I thought I'd use, meaning to do natural, landscapey sorts of things with them.

And below again are the materials I actually used!!

This is what the piece of fabric with the three painted sections looked like when wet.  Notice that I wet the whole area I wanted to paint first so that the colours merged and spread out well on the fabric. 

And this is what it looked like dry - considerably lighter.  As you can see from the tubes of paint photo, I've used watercolours and I really should have remembered how much lighter they dry.  Having said that, I didn't really mind the change too much as I've made the mistake of having an over-poweringly painted background before.  I also learned that Sap Green' dries with quite a hard edge (as does Permanent Rose to a degree) - something to look out for another time.

The middle of the three was the one intended for this ribbon piece as I wanted to give the impression of a pot of flowers in a yard with a wall/fence (the brown-ish colour) and some greenery (the green spots dropped into the brown whilst still wet), on a paved area (the grey at the bottom).

The embroidery itself took around an hour and, as it was done in evening light and was a quick stitch, there are no WIP photos this time, but here's the finished piece, mounted in a card and looking a lot nicer, I think!

Do you agree?  I do like the general design and love the plant pot button - in fact I'm planning to get hold of a few, probably from the Crafty Ribbons booth at the Harrogate Knitting and Stitching Show, presuming they'll be there.  So that part was good, but I think the black background, to say nothing of the awful slightly blurred and totally 'flat' photograph on the kit was a big no-no.  Not surprisingly, I got this as part of a sale on their website - discontinued kits.

PS, In case anyone's wondering what's planned for the other two painted backgrounds, the simple answer is nothing.  I found the green on the left hand one just too vibrant and felt it didn't go with the ribbon piece I had in mind and the right hand idea just no longer works for me.  I was going to do a small sampler with a crazy quilt appearance as a support for my catch-up on TAST.  I still quite like the idea, but don't think this one worked and so will consider trying another one soon.

Text and images © Elizabeth Braun 2012