Thursday 24 March 2011

Edging the foxglove in gold

First, a quick note on photographs.  I won't bore you with the reasons but some of the photos here are taken with a proper camera, and some, the ones further down, with my phone.  This has not helped with their quality, so sorry about that, but hopefully you should still be able to see what I'm talking about.

Back to the sewing: the next flowers to get their goldwork edging are the foxgloves.  I started with the biggest flowers and worked my way along, so here are the two largest ones done:


I know I mentioned it before, but it still amazes me how much of a difference this makes; the edged flowers look nice and neat, while the unedged ones look ragged and messy.  It really demonstrates how well worth doing this stage is!

I'm couching the gold thread with the embroidery cotton of the same colour as the edge of the flower itself.  So far, with the fern and the foxgloves, that's just been the one colour (Madeira stranded cotton 0101 for the foxglove), but the flowers, or rather the buds, towards the top have an edge in two colours, 0101 and 1409 (pale green).  This means couching part of the gold outline in one thread, then switching to the other to complete it:


Here are all the small flowers and buds, showing the two colour couching stitches:


And the completed foxglove in its entirety:


Finally, an extremely bad picture of all the goldwork edging done so far:

2 comments:

  1. The photos came out impressively well for being done on a phone! Tell me please, how do you get them from the phone to the computer?? I've had a couple of images on my mobile for ages that I really want to put on the computer, but haven't a clue how....

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  2. I've got an iPhone (which I'm using now!), so I can connect it to my computer and just copy them over. I've also emailed them to myself in the past and got them that way. I suppose it depends on what phone you have and what it can do.

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