Thinking About Pansies

I have been pondering pansies lately. There's a project I'm looking forward to working on that involves pansies, lots and lots of pansies! I want to wait until a couple of the current projects are finished before starting the pansy project, but in the meantime I've been looking around at real and embroidered pansies for ideas.

Trish Burr has created some wonderful pansy projects and I've worked some of them, the most recent being Victorian Pansies. Before those, I stitched a design simply called Pansies.

Bead-dazzled!

Occasionally, I take a needlework class with no intention of finishing the project. It's a rare occurrence, but sometimes I just want to learn a specific technique or see how a particular designer/teacher approaches embroidery work. That's not the case with Wild Child. I do want to finish the project, and I'm learning interesting things as well!

I have completed most of the stitching on the white flowers (outlines and centres). I'm still debating whether or not I'll fill them with randomly placed beads, but that decision can wait until the end of the project.

Gold Leaf

Back in 2007, I had the opportunity to take three goldwork classes over six days with the Royal School of Needlework (RSN) in Iowa. (The RSN used to teach in Iowa every year.) In one of the classes, I learned several metal thread techniques by working a goldwork rose. In the final class, we embroidered a more modern take on goldwork which included this gold leather leaf sprinkled with beads.

Laziness is the Mother of Invention

I'm having the best time ever stitching all the white flowers on the Wild Child wallet.

No, that's not quite true. After the first couple of flowers, I got bored. I can't help it. I don't like a lot of repetition. One aspect, in particular, of the outlining of the flowers really bugged me for some reason.

Leaf Lesson

In the last installment of the Antique Society Silk Violets, I detailed the stitching plan for the flowers. This time, I want to share my approach to the leaves.

(Warning: This is going to get extremely geeky!)

The leaves are composed of three greens.