Finishing up Herbier

Herbier was completed fairly quickly although I created more work for myself by adding more of the gorgeous House of Embroidery (HoE) threads to the mix.

I had a bit of assistance while stitching, although she was at her most helpful when sleeping!

I made changes to the piece mostly, it turns out, to the surrounding motifs: the garland, outer flowers, and butterflies.

As for the nine motifs that make up the bulk of the design, I primarily made changes to the three motifs that run diagonally from upper left to lower right. There's a lot of room on this design to 'do your own thing' and I think I could almost stitch it again and come up with something completely different.

When it came time to do the butterflies in the corners I decided to stitch each one differently. I have issues with symmetry and repetition in embroidery. I get bored. For the butterflies, I limited myself to threads that were already used on the piece so I felt a bit limited. There are a lot of greens which didn't work for me butterfly-wise. I was left with a lot of rosy pinks, a bit of purple, some yellow and white. I also used the pink-orange variegated HoE.

I like some of the butterflies better than others, but I am mostly happy that they are not all the same.

The lower wings on this one remind of eggs for some reason.

This butterfly, my favourite, inspired the changes on the Duftin Summer Flowers table runner. I discovered that I could indeed do 'shading' with variegated threads!

All finished.

It was nice to do some surface embroidery that combined decorative stitching with touches of thread painting.

References

• Needle 'n Thread: Review of HoE threads
• Canevas Folies Free Pattern (includes 3 of the Herbier motifs)