While waiting for the glue to dry on my pet guardian angels (yes, I'm finishing them but there are 6 and the weather is not cooperating), I have been stitching Mom's birthday present. Yesterday I added the leaves in several embroidery stitches (long and short, outline stitch, herringbone) using 2 plies of Mandarin Floss medium green #M817. The darker vein down the middle of most of the leaves was done in Grandeur G848, which is a #5 silk perle which is darker and less olive green than the Mandarin Floss.I have a little spool of Bijoux in my stash that is brown (there's no number on the spool, sorry) so I added a few short stitches here and then to the wisteria vine to add a highlight sparkle here and there.
It occurred to me as I worked that there's no way to really explain how I choose a spot to add a highlight to the vine or how I figured out which embroidery stitch to use on the leaves. I learned to do crewel embroidery in college and this gave me a good grounding in embroidery and a feel for what looks right in natural pieces. You have to work from instinct, which I know bothers a lot of people. The best I can tell you is to work slowly with only a few plies (I used two instead of the four I've been using for the blue areas and the three I used for the vine stem) so you can either pull out a stitch that doesn't look right or easily cover it with another stitch in the right position.
The last thing I did is take one full strand of my dark brown Mandarin Floss and lay it across the top wisteria stem. The teapot top is supposed to be indicated by a straight line of tent stitches that are dark blue and then change to dark brown. Since I used stem stitch for the vine and worked from the right to left and from the bottom to the top, I couldn't do that. I think the straight line looks ok and gives you the idea of the lid that comes right off when you make tea.
I've started the silk ribbon embroidery but I'll talk about that tomorrow. I'm still trying to figure out how to explain what I did clearly. Communication is hard!
Jane/Chilly Hollow
Main blog at http://blog.360.yahoo.com/chillyhollow
