Cowslips

The very last sheet of flowers!  Well, for the bottom panel, anyway.  This one is the only appearance on the panel of the cowslip (Primula veris), though it's a bit complicated, so it's probably just as well there's just the one.

I'm doing the flowers themselves first, and will do the leaves afterwards.  It's hard to tell scale from the photos, but the smallest of the three flower heads is about an inch (2.5cm) in diameter.  In that space are seven individual flowers, with central shading, and the sepal cups that connect them to the stem.  That's a lot to pack into a very small space, and you can probably now guess why I've put them off to last.

I did the cups first, outlining them in buttonhole stitch in Madeira 1409, the very palest green that I'll be using anywhere on the Banner:

A close-up of the largest of the flower heads:

The detail on the cups was done in split stitch with three strands of 1410:

I then filled in the rest of the cups in split stitch in 1409:

And again in close-up:

The photo makes the difference in shade look more pronounced than it does in real life; the effect is actually more subtle than it looks here.

Starting on the flowers themselves, I buttonhole stitched the edges in the main yellow shade I'm using for them, 0105.  As the flowers are a sort of bell shape and aren't depicted side on, I also used a line of buttonhole stitch to define the upper rim of the bell:

The close-up might show that a bit more clearly:

The filling-in shading needs to highlight the interior of each flower - that comes next.