VS Renaissance Rose Bellpull - bullions!

I mentioned in my last posting on this project that I'm often wary of bullion knots.  I think that, with a combination of Kathy's extremely helpful, 'alternative' method of working them (compare how the needle is held in this, more traditional approach, which I find overly awkward to work and leads to puckering)and the sheer quantity of knots that I had to work on my one and only piece of Brazilian embroidery and the 'Sunshine and Flowers' sampler, I've managed to get a fair grip on how to get them to work out OK.  I was really quite pleased with how the majority of these came out.

Having said that, I still wouldn't call myself confident with them, but I'm certainly getting there. ☺  I need to try the same do it over and over again method with cast on stitches and flowers next as I'd love to master those.

You may have noticed especially in the big heart, but also in the other two, smaller motifs with the bullion roses, that there were some pink lazy daisy stitches to insert too, which also add variety and balance to the piece.  Having said 'balance', I realised, looking at this photo, that the roses are much more numerous on one side than the other, but oddly, I didn't notice when looking straight at it.  Maybe this angle of photo has highlighted it.

This is the last section, (which I actually did first) and you can also see that I also worked the outer border as far as I could ready to make the piece up into a bellpull.  The original design was to be framed, so I had to think carefully about how to go about it.  More on that in the next in this series.

Text and images © Elizabeth Braun 2017