Crewel work in progress, RHS Certificate

 

The stitching has begun. 

After using the prick and pounce method to place the design onto the fabric, the outline is painted in. This wasn't as easy as it appeared, and you can see I didn't achieve a very smooth result, more practice required! First stitches, battlement couching, a lovely filling stitch.



Moving on.

Adding burden stitch, van dyke stitch, laid work and couching, which was later removed and replaced with something lighter.


The Stem.



The green stem began as burden stitch but I couldn't get this work for me nor did I like the result here, so I researched some other ideas and decided to go with a more freehand block shading idea. I think it's quite fun and a nice textural contrast to the red stem. I added the pompoms using woven wheel, French knots and satin stitch, these were lovely to do and I had 3 sets of 3. 






Beginning to come together.

It was difficult to really predict how the stitches would work together. The colours, chosen over the internet were not as subtle as expected and balancing them across the individual motifs as well as the picture as a whole was interesting, and threw up some unexpected results. There was a lot of unpicking when something just didn't work.

Here the couching on the left element is being changed and the flower on the righthand side isn't working, nor are the leaves on this element. These elements were difficult to balance with the rest of the design, the predicted stitches were not working well in reality and changed a few times before I felt the balance within the element was correct as well as in the overall design.
















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