Final ferns and foxglove

The last of the goldwork edging!  Not much to do now, just one fern:

And another:

And the last one:

Then the second foxglove:

The ferns and the foxglove together:

And finally, all the goldwork edging done:

That's quite a major stage completed.  Now I need to add the stems and tendrils, then the panel will be finished.

A few flower photos

I may have mentioned this before, but I have a new camera!

I'm in grave danger of becoming a camera bore to my nearest and dearest, and now you, but I don't care - I just love it.  For the record, it's a Sony NEX-3, which is sort of baby DSLR: SLR quality, but with the sort of hand-holding and automated functions you'd expect from a more basic point-and-click camera.  Which is absolutely perfect for me - I'd wanted much better quality photos than I've been producing from my old, and pretty basic, camera, but don't have the first clue about shutter speeds and apertures and whatnot.  With this one, you can set all of that stuff yourself if you so wish, but if the thought of that makes you want to burst into tears, it'll do it all for you.  (Even better - I got a really good deal on it in the shop.  Quite a bit of money off, and lots of freebies thrown in!  It pays to haggle.)

I haven't taken it out and about yet, though I'm really looking forward to doing that.  In the meantime, though, here are a few trial photos of flowers in my home and garden - click on the photo to see a larger version.

Firstly, an orchid on my dining room table:

Some primroses:

A late snowdrop:

And a few pics of a couple of pieris bushes.  White flowers:

A mass of red bracts and green leaves:

Some of the bracts in close-up:

And bracts and flowers

I'm thrilled with how they've turned out, I really am.  These are by far the best photos I've ever taken.  I've always known how I wanted my photos to look, but they never did, so I was always disappointed with them, and came to regard photography as a means to an end - some images I could work up into a design - rather than an end in itself.  All of a sudden, things have changed.  I think I've found a new hobby!

Little flowers on the left

Moving to the left of the panel, it's the turn of the little flowers to get their goldwork edging.  First a pearlwort:

Then three small (in one case, downright tiny) pearlworts:

And one more pearlwort, all on its own:

All the pearlworts together:

Then the three wood avens, as part of the cluster:

Giving all the little flowers on the left:

And all the edging work done so far:

Not much to do now!

By the way, and taking the compression mangling that Blogger seems to do into account, I really do think my photos are improving.  That's more down to having a better camera than anything I'm doing, though, I think.

Goldwork edging: cowslip and ferns

I'm making good progress with the goldwork edging, with quite a bit to show you today.  First, the cowslip in the centre of the panel.  Here are the leaves, with the gold thread couched with Madeira stranded cotton 1410:

The smallest of the three flowers, using Madeira 0105 for the couching stitches:

And the medium-sized one:

As the flowers are quite a complex shape, I can't just go all the way round with one length of thread, I need to stop and start.  So, here's the largest flower before I finished off the ends, to show how many small lengths were needed:

The ends were all pulled through to the back of the fabric and finished off neatly:

So here's the cowslip, nicely edged with gold:

This central section also has three more ferns, and I did them next.  The one above the cowslip:

Below and to the right:

And to the left:

Here's the central section with the finished cowslip and ferns, and a couple of little flowers creeping into shot:

And all the goldwork edging done so far:

I'm over half way!  There's still quite a bit of edging to do, but at least I feel I'm on the last lap.  Of this phase, anyway...

Lots of little flowers

Some light at the end of the photography tunnel, or so I hope: I've bought a new camera!  It's a bit complicated, though, with lots of settings I don't understand, so it's likely to take me a while to get to grips with it.  From this you can probably gather that the standard of photography isn't about to improve any time soon, but let's all hope that once I've worked out what I'm supposed to be doing that the pictures pick up.

Anyway, more flowers edged with goldwork.  A wood aven:

And a pearlwort:

The wood aven and the pearlwort with the ferns and foxglove:

The biggest wood aven, next to the central cowslip:

And all the little flowers together:

Heading up to half way, all the edging done so far:

I think I need to find out how to use the flash!

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:

Goldwork edging

Now all the appliqué’s done, it's time to start edging all the embroidered pieces with gold thread.  I like this stage - it makes a huge difference to the look of it.

As I was already at the right-hand end of the panel, it seemed reasonable to start the edging there, and work my way back along, which more or less means doing the flowers in reverse order to how I stitched them on.

To do the edging, I'm couching a single no. 8 imitation Japanese gold thread around the edge, using one strand of the same stranded embroidery cotton that I used for the buttonhole stitch around the edge of each piece as the couching thread.  The stitches are quite closely spaced, about a millimetre or so apart, which gives an effect which tones with the colour of the applied item but still allows the gold to sparkle through.

So, starting with the last three ferns to be applied, here's one of them edged, using Madeira stranded cotton 1411 as the couching thread:

And another one:

Just as a comparison, here they both are with an unedged flower in between:

It makes quite a difference, doesn't it!  The only thing I've done is couch the gold thread around the edge - I haven't trimmed the linen margin at all, for instance, though I admit that any odd linen fibres that were still visible after I’d finished the goldwork I poked under it with the eye end of a needle, to make sure everything was as neat as possible.

Adding the edging really does transform the appliqué, and really is worth doing - I always edge appliqué, whether with a couched thread or cord as here, or with a row of stitches (usually chain stitch) around the outside in a matching or toning thread.  The way it neatens things up is amazing.

So, here are all three ferns, neatly edged, and making the rest of the flowers look rather messy:

Never mind, they'll all get their turn!