Flower petals

With the petals outlined with buttonhole stitch, they now need to be filled in.  I'm going to use split stitch for this, partly because it's historically accurate, but also because I like it. I've nothing against satin stitch or long and short, but for my own work, I prefer the subtlety of shading and the texture split stitch gives.

I'm using two colours for the petals - Madeira 0103 and 0104, with 0104 being the slightly darker of the two.  Even though the flowers are pretty small and the shading won't really be that noticeable unless someone gets up quite close, I think it's worth doing as otherwise the flowers could look quite flat, while hopefully with some shading, they should look more natural even if the technique used to achieve this isn't immediately obvious.  That's the plan, anyway!

So, I want each petal to be slightly darker at the centre of the flower.  I worked a band of stitches in 0104 around the central 'star':

This band is deliberately irregular, as I don't want the flowers looking stiff or formal, but want a softer line.

I'll go into more detail on this when I'm working on something a bit larger and it's easier to show what I'm doing, but I then added a second band that introduces the shading:

And then finally filled in the rest of the petals in the lighter shade, 0103, which is the one I used for the buttonhole outline:

As you can see, I've stitched over the buttonhole stitch 'legs'.  This completely covers the design lines that had been showing through.  As a bonus, the stitches over the legs around the edge are slightly higher than the ones that are not; this makes each petal slightly concave, and while it's hardly pronounced enough to qualify as stumpwork, it does help to make the flowers less flat and a little more natural.

Here are all the flowers, up to this stage, and almost completed:

To finish them off, I added a few French knots in the centre, in 0103:

So here are all of the very first sheet of flowers, completed:

I think they've turned out nicely, if I do say so myself!