Beginning Ribbon Embroidery

Now that my Millennium frame was devoid of the Jacobean piece, I was free to use it for my Lorna Bateman ribbon embroidery kit. As a reminder, here's what the piece I ordered looks like:

It's so lovely. I can only hope mine will look that good when I'm done. 😂 

The kit came with a piece of very fine linen, with the pattern already transferred onto it (huzzah!), and a soft, loose-weave, possibly muslin material to back it in. It's important to have the grain lines of the ground and backing fabrics match up as closely as possible to avoid warping. So I pinned them together, trying my best to match up the grain lines:

Then I basted across all four sides:

With that done, I removed the pins and framed it up on my Millennium frame, which took less than five minutes (I love this frame!):

Once it was framed up, I had to remove the top line of basting because it was causing a pucker. Somehow, I had a tiny bit more linen between the top and bottom lines of basting than I did muslin. But once I took that thread out, the fabric was beautifully smooth, and the grain lines still looked pretty even, though I admit that matching up grain lines is not my strong suit.

At this point, I sat down and read through all the rest of the kit instructions and, unfortunately, soon became a little lost. I wish there was more information about work order, as I'm not quite sure where to start. With so many flowers bunched together in such a small space, I have a feeling that doing things in a certain order will determine how difficult this is to stitch and how nice it ends up looking. The kit only says to do the stems first. And there are no instructions at all for some things — like the bees. I have no idea how they made those. 😕

I was also rather confused by some of the instructions for the stitches, so I ended up ordering the book A ~ Z of Ribbon Embroidery, as the kit suggests, because I just needed more help with the basics. And the book does have beautifully clear diagrams that have already proved useful.

I didn't want to mess up the beautiful materials for this kit until I knew what I was doing, so I took some spare legacy linen and muslin I had on hand and just framed them up in a hoop to practice on:

As you can see, I stitched a few stems and some tiny flowers with the practice silk ribbon they sent in the kit (that is really a handy feature). Here's a close-up:

I think it looks pretty good for my first effort at ribbon embroidery. 😊 I need to practice some other types of stitches on my remaining stems before I get going on the real thing. But I think I may also want to see if I can find a skilled ribbon embroiderer to give me some guidance on work order. Time to start searching the internet for blogs and videos.