Small Jacobean Flowers, Part 2

 Remember these little flowers I stitched?

Remember how orange the peach flower seemed after I added the dark peach? Well, after several days, that flower was still not working for me — or the piece as a whole. It was just too bright for the subtle color scheme I was going for. Soooo, I ripped it out. Stitch by stitch, I snipped, tugged, tweezed, and removed the entire thing. The pattern lines came up with it, so I had to re-stitch the outline.

But that done, I decided to redo the flower up to the point where I had still liked it. To begin, the pale peach:

Ahh, yes, the soft, subtle, delightful pale peach. I was on the right track with that. Next, the medium peach:

Just lovely. Still fitting in well with the colors around it. But what to do now? I couldn't fill in the outer petals with that dark peach. (We all know how well that turned out. *shudder*)

For inspiration, I turned to the new silk threads I had recently purchased at The Attic Needlework shop just a few miles down the road from me. I didn't even know this shop was there until my Japanese embroidery tutor Mary Alice told me about it. She lives in Texas but visits the shop whenever she comes to Phoenix. 

To my utter delight, they carry all manner of silk threads, legacy linen, and a variety of other needlework necessities, which means I will no longer need to order these from far away and pay the extra shipping costs and wait weeks, even months during COVID, for them to arrive.  And the ladies who run the shop are lovely. I had the nicest conversation with Jean and Cheri.

The reason for my little jaunt to the shop was that I had just gotten paid and divvied up my October paychecks into my November budgets. Flush with cash and filled with the joie de vivre and carefree, spendthrift ways that always imbue me at the beginning of a new month, I purchased my first Au Ver à Soie threads:

They really are lovely. At $5 per 5-meter skein or spool, the price adds up quickly. (By contrast, DMC threads are only about 56 cents for an 8-meter skein.) But still, it's Au Ver à Soie silk! I have always wanted to try stitching with Au Ver à Soie threads, but back when I ordered all my fine needlework supplies online, I couldn't see the colors in real life. And given how expensive it is, I didn't want to take the risk of ending up with a skein that was the wrong color. Being able to pick them out in person was just what I needed to take the plunge.

I purchased four skeins of the Soie d'Alger — one in blue and three in varying shades of lavender. I also bought two spools of Soie de Paris in green and golden yellow. I purchased most of these threads for another project, but I bought the blue for this Jacobean piece because I figured it was a good time to practice stitching with silk, and that blue is so lovely. But for this flower, I decided to use that golden yellow to do some padded satin stitch in the center of the flower:

It adds a glorious shimmer. Nothing really can compare to silk. 

But I had stalled long enough and still needed to figure out what to do with the rest of this flower. I decided to do something similar to the last time. I stem stitched around the whole petal in the pale peach and whipped the stem stitch in the medium peach:

Not too bad. I didn't perhaps love it yet, but I definitely didn't hate it. And at least the color scheme was still working well for me. Next, I decided to do the little pointed leaves in very soft shades of blue (again, whipped stem stitch), just to see how it would look:

I actually liked the delicate effect of the blue and peach whipped stem stitches next to each other. So I kept going. Next, I stem stitched around the flower center in medium peach and then stem stitched the leaf vein lines in a medium blue:

I was feeling okay about it at this point. I wasn't yet in raptures over it (as I am about the leaves above and below it), but I thought it was pretty, if a trifle unfinished looking. My main issue was how separate the leaves felt from the flowers. I wanted to do something to bring them all together.

Enter silver rococo thread! I intended this piece to incorporate goldwork techniques (in silver), but thus far, I had only added some pearl purl interwoven with DMC floss to the element at the base of the piece. I decided it was time to add some more silver thread. So I couched down some very fine silver rococo around the outer edge of the entire flower:

First of all, I love the wavy line of the rococo; it looks really nice next to the whipped stem stitch. Secondly, adding rococo all the way around the petals and leaves made this flower feel much more cohesive. And thirdly, I just love the delicate silver trim on this flower. It's the perfect finishing touch.

At this point, I really started to love this flower. And best of all, it feels like it fits in with the overall piece:

Seen in context, this flower has a delicate, subtle color scheme that blends in well with the rest of the piece. Now that little lavender flower up to the left no longer bothers me. I really think it was just that dark peach that was throwing everything off. Sometimes you have to play with colors and patterns a bit to figure out what's not working and what to do instead.

I'm really, really happy with this so far. I'm excited to keep going on it, but I just heard from Mary Alice, and she got some thread from Midori to match the green silk I ran out of on my Japanese embroidery piece. It's in the mail and should arrive this week. Which means I can finally pick back up on my maple leaves! I've really missed doing JE. But I will still try to make time for this one because I'm loving it — both the experience of stitching it and how it's turning out.