Curved stems

Other than the cowslips, all the stems on the panel are wavy or curved.  I applied all the flowers more or less by eye, aided a lot by the grid, and that's what I'm doing for the stems too.  Well it's worked so far!  All the same, I'm not a make-a-start-and-see-where-it-leads-you sort of person, and I like to have a pretty good idea of where things are to go.

For this stem, I started with a couple of couching stitches at the top of the thread, next to the flower:

Using Fiona's design as a guide, I laid the thread on the fabric, and moved it about until I was happy with the line it took. Unfortunately, it wasn't just going to sit there and wait for me to stitch it down - it needed to be held in place.  So, I added a handful of stitches all the way down the thread:

Here it is with half a dozen or so stitches down the length of the thread:

This was enough to hold the shape of the line as I went back up the thread, couching it down with stitches spaced about a millimetre apart:

And with a couple more stems added:

For the first time, I actually quite like the fern!