Santa's Lei

I'm reposting yesterday's photo of Santa on his surfboard because I'd started on the lei in this photograph.  (Sorry, Google is randomly deleting photos and many of them I cannot replace.). See how I have done 5 "spokes" on the painted flowers?  That's how I start on each flower. I used three colors of ribbon floss for the flowers.  This thread is ribbon-like and does twist so I used a laying tool to keep the "petal" stitches flat when I did the first 5 or so stitches.  They are spaced out so that I can see exactly the margins of the flowers.  I'm doing these stitches like an eyelet stitch, coming up at the outside edge of each flower and then going down into the same center hole for each stitch.  Ribbon floss is thin, so the center hole isn't enlarged much but if I was using another thread, I might have to poke the tip of my scissor blade into the center to make room for all the threads before starting to stitch a flower.

The next step is to fill in the flowers by adding more petals.  This time I didn't always use the laying tool as a twisted stitch adds dimension.  You can see that one flower was made using both orange and yellow stitches.  I only wanted one multi-colored flower and I stuck it in the back side so that it wasn't prominent.  I tried to space out my three colors of flowers so that I did not have too much of one color in an area.  The flowers are the focal point of this design and brighten it up since I muted the Hawaiian shirt colors and Santa's got a white beard and rides a brown surfboard. Even the waves and water don't add a great deal of color as green is a neutral.  So I needed LOUD flowers.

This is an earlier photo of the lei but it shows the French knots I put in the centers well.  I also did two bullions, but they are harder to do with ribbon floss and also a bit too much to be in every single flower in my opinion.

By the way, I forgot yesterday to add that I'd put a sleeve cuff on Santa's Hawaiian shirt.  It's just a long stitch wrapped over and over again in the same purple DMC floss that I used in the shirt.

Tomorrow you'll see a finished photo of this ornament including the lei and after that I'll talk about how Joan Thomasson says to finish it.

Written by Jane/Chilly Hollow
Blogging at http://chillyhollownp.blogspot.com
Archived Yahoo 360 postings at http://profiles.yahoo.com/chillyhollow