Merry Chrysanthemum

I hope everyone is enjoying the holidays. I've been off work for a few weeks while I wait to start my new job on 5th January so I've been able to get in some serious stitching time.  As well as completing my Moon Cherries design I've completed another design which I embroidered as a Christmas gift for my sister.  Now it has been delivered I can share it with you.  The design for this one came from The Antique Pattern Library. This is a great resource for all designers, it's an on line resource of out of copyright designs for embroidery, quilting, crochet, bookbinding, woodworking, and many other crafts. This particular design came from a copy of Hemingway embroidery transfers.

This particular transfer is a design of chrysanthemums, it is a very simple design so I wanted to use the colours to make it special.  I searched on Pinterest and on Flickr for interesting chrysanthemum colours and found one that was a lovely combination of orange and yellow.  You can see the original here. 

I used one of the sample fabrics I have which has a nice mottled effect, it is a soft shade of brown which works well with the orange and yellow silk of the flower.  I was sent a new transfer pencil recently by the lovely Denise and tried it out on this design.  I've used these before but they have not been very successful onto silk. This one however works very well.  It's a Sublime Stitching, iron-on transfer pen.

To make sure I got a nice edge to the petals I outlined them with couching thread.  I embroidered the first few without padding but they looked flat and dull.  I tried one petal with padding cotton, this worked much better so I took the others out and re-stitched them.

The first green I chose didn't work, it was too bright.  It doesn't look so bad in the photo but I didn't like it.  I left it in to use as a contrast when I moved onto the leaves.

Next job was the large chrysanthemum.  As before I outlined and padded the petals.  As there were so many I did a few at at time.  Most of the outline was done with line of held thread, I find I get a much nicer curved line doing them this way.

After spending some time looking at different greens for the leaves.  One half of the leaf was worked with twisted thread.

The other half I worked in the same coloured flat silk.  I know I've seen leaves worked like this before, I can't remember where but it came to mind while I was working the twisted side so I decided to give it a try.

Once I completed the two leaves I went back to finishing the large flower. To create more depth, I used various levels of padding, the very back petals don't have any while some of the mid level have self padding.

The little bud was given three layers of padding to make it nice and fat.

I also wanted to give the stem some depth so I couched twisted couching thread into the middle of the stem and then embroidered over the top in diagonal layer flat silk.

 

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