Battlement Couching

Since my JE piece is on hold, I decided to go back to my Jacobean piece. If you recall, I really got stuck trying to do battlement couching on the central leaf element:

I wasn't at all happy with how it turned out, and I picked the whole thing out. I really wanted to do battlement couching on this leaf, but I wasn't sure how to make it better. Obviously I needed to make my lines more even and use a slightly thicker strand of thread, but the colors felt off, too.

It simply felt overly dark and dramatic. After mulling this over for a few weeks, I finally decided to try going from dark to light instead of from light to dark. That way, the darker threads would end up more hidden. I also decided to use lighter colors overall to minimize the contrast.

This time, I started with three strands of DMC floss in a medium-dark shade of blue and laid this down as the base grid using one of my special transparent JE rulers to try and get the lines as even as possible:

I also stroked the threads with my Japanese tekobari to get them smoother and flatter so they would lay evenly. This worked pretty well:

You can see that they're lying pretty flat and smooth. The shadow of the threads on the underside is showing through in a few places, but I went back later and whipped them along the border of the leaf so they wouldn't be visible.

In further reflecting on my color choices, I decided not to use the dark peach I had used the first time — it was too much of a contrast and I wanted this leaf to be slightly more delicate. So when I had gotten through my lighter blues, I switched to pale yellow:

I think this is much more successful. It's still a very interesting geometric pattern, but it's a touch more subtle than before, which is what I was going for. The lines aren't perfectly square, in spite of using my special ruler, but I wasn't sure I could get them more even than this. It's kind of tricky to do this stitch perfectly. So I decided to keep it as is and just couched down the corners of the yellow threads with a dark blue.

It took me a day or two to figure out what I wanted to do for the edges of this leaf. I was plagued by indecision, so I finally decided to do a simple stem stitch around the lower edge of the leaf in the same dark blue that I had couched the corners of the yellow thread. For a bit of variety, I did a chain stitch border on the upper edge of the leaf and then whipped it in both directions with a very light shade of blue:

The upper side of the leaf is supposed to have a wider border, though, and the whipped chain stitch wasn't quite enough to fill it, so I added a row of stem stitch just above the whipped chain stitch:

I didn't love it yet, but I thought perhaps another touch of yellow would draw it all together, so I whipped the upper row of stem stitch with yellow:

I actually quite liked the look of this at this point, so I decided to stop fiddling with it. Here's what it looks like in the context of the rest of the piece:

It fits in a lot better than the original battlement couching I did, but it still adds just a touch of drama and intrigue. I'm really pleased with it.

The last thing I did during my stitching session was to make a tiny change on the lower left stem. I had done two rows of chain stitch and whipped the outer edges but had never been fully satisfied with it. Now I decided to whip the inner edges together as well:

It's a small change, but I like it. It gives that stem a bit more depth and fullness. It's not my favorite element, but I think it may do. Though, of course, I always reserve the right to go back later, take it out, and redo it in a completely different style.

Anyway, that's all the progress I've made so far, as the battlement couching took quite a while to do. But hopefully I will find a bit more time for it this week after work.