Ring Cushion - moving towards completion

Of course, the whole cushion is already finished and handed over as the wedding is tomorrow at noon, but there are still so many photos etc, that I've decided to split the last stages in to two posts.

The first thing to do was to complete the smaller plant elements, leaf veins and stems that were left over from the stage you saw last weekend.  This is the first 'attempt' at it, but the pink main stems for the evening primroses, whilst they looked passable on the left hand side, were really wishy-washy on the right and were lost amongst the brighter herb robert stems.  So, my next move was to replace them with something darker and more easy to distinguish among a mass of stems.  I used one strand each of a green and a brown - the only part of the project worked in two strands.  Here's the result, complete with my dummy yellow paper butterfly.

Moving on now to the creation of the brimstone butterfly (in keeping with the yellow theme of the flowers for the ceremony etc).  After a false start trying to work some wings directly onto the yellow silk fabric that I used for the cushion back with some 34 gauge beading wire and some Pipers Silk floss, I decided to try them on a piece of fine cotton lawn, some white paper covered 30 gauge wire and good old stranded cotton instead.  I needed the fabric to be yellow all through, so as to avoid the all too common white edges that can be seen on some wired stumpwork pieces.  I remembered that my silk dyes could also be used on cotton, so I mixed together my warm and cool yellow shades to get something that would match well and soaked the fabric well with it.  Once it was dry, the whole thing was dyed through and I could attach the wires as you can see here.  The shapes were taken from Jane Nicholas' latest book, 'Stumpwork Butterflies and Moths', but scaled down a tiny bit.  (The body area I created myself with simple padded satin stitch and a few straight stitches.)

Here you can see the next stage, the filling in of the embroidery of the wings.  You can see that I added a little grey on the inner edge to try and make it as realistic as possible.  I carried this all the way through to the edging and that left me with a slight colour mismatch problem along the inner edge as you can see in this next shot:

Not a major problem though.  I found a silver gel pen that was just right for colouring in the yellow edges that were sticking through the grey and eliminated that problem altogether.=)  Here's the finished butterfly in position on the piece:

What about the whole of the finished piece?  Look out for that next week!=)

Text and images © Elizabeth Braun 2014