Plantagenet Wreath - roses (part III)

The roses are finally finished!  Sorry that they've taken so long, but I got there in the end.

Last time, I'd filled in half of the 20 roses; I've now done them all, and here they are:

They're not quite finished, though: the little green leaves (or whatever the correct name is - does anyone know?) still need to be completed.

And here they are!

That's all the embroidery - now I need to cut it out.  Now that's going to be fiddly.

Advance warning: the blog is moving!

Just a note for regular readers: this blog will be moving to a new address in the next few weeks.

For years now, my website and my blog have been at different locations.  I'm currently getting the website redeveloped, and as part of that I'm bringing the blog into it.  All past posts should still be present and correct (I hope - that's the plan, anyway) but will be at the new address, and after the changeover happens all new posts will be there too.

I don't have a date yet when this is going to happen - it's still early days for the development work - but it should be reasonably soon.

I'll let you have more details when I know them!

Plantagenet Wreath - stitching the roses

Still slow progress on the roses, though I am getting there.  In the mean time, here's a closer look at stitching one individual rose.

The shading is already done, of course, so here I'm just filling in the rest with the off-white.

This is one of the larger roses, so there's a bit more stitching involved to fill it all in but the principle is the same for both. Firstly, I did all the rose petal 'lips', the bits that fold over at the top:

Before starting on the rest of the petals, I make life a bit easier for myself by putting in stitches to show where each petal starts and finishes:

I then went right round the rose adding a layer of long and short stitches:

And then round a second time, filling in the rest:

One more rose finished!  Still quite a few to go though...

Plantagenet Wreath - roses (part II)

Other things have got in the way a bit recently, so I haven't got as far as I'd hoped with the roses.  Still, I have done half of them, which is something.

And here they are, filled in with Madeira stranded cotton no. 2402:

The full wreath:

I'm going to be busy for the next couple of weeks too, but I'll do what I can, and hopefully it won't be too long before I can show you them all finished!

Plantagenet Wreath - roses (part I)

Just the roses left to embroider.

You may remember that when we looked at the colours to be used for the roses, it included a shade of pink, Madeira stranded cotton no. 0303.  Although the roses are going to be (mostly) white, I'm using a bit of pink too.

The stylised rose design has a feature that I've always taken to be the top of each petal turned over a little.  I need to highlight this in some way, and so as the embroidery will be applied to a dark red velvet once it's completed, I'm picking it out in a complementary shade: the pink.

I've stitched over the lines of this detail in split stitch:

And a close-up:

If this is an overhang, then there should be a bit of shadow cast underneath it onto the petal below; I'm adding this using small stitches in one strand of the pink and one of the off-white used for the outlining, no. 2402:

and in close-up again:

Next time, I'll fill in the rest of the roses.