Wedding pillow - stitching the lavender and greenery

Part two of the wedding pillow piece coming up......

I decided to start with the sprig of lavender as I thought it would be the most bitty and also, in a way, the most challenging to stitch.  The rest would be needle-stroke heavy (i.e. time consuming), but this was the part I was most uncertain of.

I started with the blue and purple flower section and used the A-Z book I mentioned last time and my own colour plan as guides.  Working to a smaller scale, I had to simplify somewhat, but it worked out ok in one shade of purply blue: Flax Blue, two bluey purples: Pansy and Pale Pansy, and one light, reddish purple: Crocus.

The greenery was worked in two shades of green: Pastel Green and Peppermint, and a tiny bit of brown: Mid Brown was added at the bottom.

The next part was the rosebud and I went for the sepals and stem before the petal section.

Greens were a bit of a problem as, whilst I have more greens than any other single colour in my Pipers Silks box, there are still nowhere near enough to get the shades right.  There are only about 21 greens as opposed to about 80 in my stranded cotton collection!  As far as I can discern now (I neglected to take colour notes at the time), I used seven shades: Leaf, Pale Leaf, Fir Green, Dark Green, Pale Olive, Muscat and Bronze Gold

These green parts were a lot trickier and more time consuming than I'd expected, especially with the tiny touches of Dark Terracotta and Dark Cerise around the edges which, if I'd honest, hid a multitude of uneven edges!!

It was much the same story with the open rose greenery.  I did the stem first and then completely forgot the thread-painting rule of working back to front and did the sepals before the leaves.  I think I was on a 'finish with this colour' role and just forgot how important it is to observe that working method if you don't want problems with abutting edges later on.

Would you believe that the lower leaf here took two hours to work?  TWO HOURS!!

In this photo you can see how incongruous some of the greens really are - especially the stems. =(  It didn't look too bad as a whole, but the rose greens are really too lurid to be realistic.  I was very tempted to order some more shades, but not only did I remember that I am NOT buying any more threads - 1632 is more than enough - but also that I was working under time pressure and couldn't really wait several days for the order to arrive, so I escaped an illicit thread splurge!

Here's the whole piece as I ended it that day having made a small start on the back petals of the rosebud.  More on the roses next week and on my baby projects over the weekend.

Text and images © Elizabeth Braun 2016