Practice Piece Finished

I finally finished my practice piece for the lace trim the other day. This is what it looked like while still on my lovely Padauk slate frame:

It took me about half an hour to take it off the frame so I could get a really good look at it on its own, and once I did, I was pretty pleased with it:

I love the effect of the vine over the double row of hemstitch. I think that gently trailing vine softens the hemstitch just a touch. And I've never seen an embroidery piece that incorporated surface stitching across hemstitch, so I like that it's kind of unique. I think the dark satin stitch buds on the top left vine curve are really pretty as well, and I'll probably replace the other elements off the vine (the French knots and single lazy daisy buds) with similar satin stitched buds in various shades of purple. I feel like the two satin stitch flowers in the light and dark purple are nice and delicate, too. So basically, those are the things I think are working well.

There are a few other things, though, that I don't feel are quite as effective. I don't like the spider wheel on the lower left flower or the spider wheel on the top right (the one with French knots around the edge). They're a little heavy for the overall pattern, and I'm just not feeling them. So I'll probably replace those with satin stitched flowers like the other two. 

Even though I like the idea of shaded leaves, and I think they're kind of pretty, they're a bit large, and my shading skills aren't quite good enough to pull them off really exquisitely. And I want this piece to be exquisite. I think I would prefer to replace them with smaller, satin stitched leaves, which would look more delicate and subtle. 

I had kind of wanted to incorporate more surface embroidery techniques in this piece, but now that I'm thinking about it, maybe sticking to satin and stem stitch would be better. Because I want to keep this pattern fairly simple so that it doesn't detract from or compete too much with the lace. Here's what it looks like with the lace laid over the edge:

I think the pattern complements the lace pretty well even now. The vine echoes the scalloped edges of the lace, and the open spaces in the hemstitch create their own lacy effect. I think if the pattern were just slightly more delicate, with fewer elements and techniques, it might complement the lace even better.

I posted this on the Needle'n'Thread FB group to see if I could get some additional feedback or ideas, and I got about 100 comments. A lot of people really thoughtfully considered these two pieces together, which I appreciated. 

Most people thought the lace and embroidery went really well together, even as is. Some people thought slight adjustments might be nice. A couple people suggested this pattern looked like styles in Italian embroidery magazines. I certainly have no objection to a little Italian elegance, so if that's how this turns out, then I'll be pretty pleased with it. :)

But there were a handful of people who thought the lace and pattern competed too much and that I should just keep them as separate pieces. Some of them thought the lace took away from the embroidery, and some thought the embroidery took away from the lace. This tended to depend on whether they preferred the embroidery or the lace.

But most people were overwhelmingly in favor of the two together, with or without adjustments. I love the lace, of course. The whole goal of this project was to design an embroidery piece worthy of it. But on a plain table runner, I kind of think the lace might be a bit boring — it could just sort of blend into a big swathe of beige. I actually think a little color helps highlight the lace. And this project was always intended to be kind of my pièce de resistance, incorporating both my lace making and my embroidery. So I'm definitely going to keep them together, but with some slight changes. 

So next up, I'm going to try a second practice piece on my Sotema linen (it's already framed up) to see if I prefer that fabric and to allow me to implement some of my proposed changes and see if they're as successful as I hope they'll be. At least one person thought I was insane to go to all this work on pieces I'm not going to use. But sometimes, you want to get it really, really right. And I'm hoping this will be an heirloom-worthy table runner when I'm finished — something that might be cherished long after I'm gone. So to me, that's worth a couple of rough drafts.