Beads and Battlement Couching

Remember how reasonably happy I was with that straight woven wheel/spider stitch on my first leaf? This is the one:

Weeeelll, that didn't last long. And in a frenzy of irritation, I removed it and redid it:

As you can see, it's much neater overall and a lot more even along that lower edge. It's still not perfect, but it's a lot better. The leaf didn't feel quite complete even then, though, so I also added a line of stem stitching along the top of the satin stitched section. I think it feels more finished that way. And then, while I was on a roll, I added some beads instead of French knots to the lower edge. 

The beads are slightly more pale pink than pale peach, but let me tell you, finding the exact shade of pale peach beads was not possible. I looked in both the big craft stores near me as well as online, and this was the best I could do. Sigh. If anyone knows of any perfectly peach beads, do let me know where I can find them, and I'll cheerfully rip these beads out and put in new ones. 😉

Happily, I did find the exact right shade of teal beads, and while I was on a beading kick, I added some to the other leaf:

I'm really digging this leaf. I love the colors. So I have officially called this one done.

Next, I decided to try something I've never done before: battlement couching! I decided to give it a go on the central leaf in the design. I started with very light colors and attempted to space them evenly:

At this point, I don't think the spacing was too bad, though it's a touch off in a few spots. So I pressed on:

I think I started getting a little off the grid with these next few rows, but I kept going:

The dark colors really heightened the drama, but I was liking the overall effect a lot, so I kept going through the whole spectrum of my blue threads, which got very dark indeed:

Things were definitely getting more uneven here, and I was already reasonably sure I was going to take this out, but since it was my first time trying this technique, I decided to finish it for practice and to learn as much as I could about what worked and what didn't. So I added a new color:

The unevenness was even more obvious at this point, but it did look kind of cool, so I finished it off with the couching stitches at the corners of the top gridline of peach threads:

It's definitely a cool stitch, but I couldn't quite fill all the space. Some of the background material is showing through.I think I should have used a few more of the lighter blues. I'd left out one or two, and I think it needed them. Also, perhaps it would be better to use three strands of floss for each color, rather than the two I used here. I may try one or both of these on my next attempt to see if works a little better. 

But most importantly, I think it's critical to get those gridlines straight from the very beginning because a tiny little deviation at the start resulted in pretty drastically uneven lines at the end. So next time, I will take a little more care with getting those lines super straight (which is actually really hard since I put a fair amount of effort into getting them straight on this one and still didn't succeed).

Here's what it looked like in the context of the whole piece:

It certainly draws the eye, but I'm just not sure I like it there as the focal point of the whole design. I took it all out shortly after taking this photo, but I can't bring myself to try it again on this leaf because I think maybe this leaf calls for something else. I'm just not sure what yet. Maybe I should do yellows and blues instead of blues and peaches. Or maybe I should just do a different type of stitching altogether. I need to think about it some more. Anyway, that's my progress on my Jacobean piece.