Monday, March 26, 2007

Spring Challenge: Love Is In The Air

This weekend I worked on my Spring Challenge block and I needed to order ribbon since the colors I wanted to use I didn't have in the right sizes. Do you see that deep red bow? That is 13mm silk ribbon but I'm wanting to use that color in the bouquet on the doily. The bow is not stitched down either I'm still not sure if I'm really going to use it. But it does seem to bring the darker red around more!
Well I didn't want to wait for the ribbon to come in and started fiddling with the bouquet. I stitched in some wavy vines using the stem stitch in three directions then added some feather stitching greenery in 2 other shades of green. I made some folded roses out of the dark 13mm ribbon and tacked them down lightly to see if I would like it. Then I took the other 2 colors of 4mm ribbon I had planned to use with it and stitched sweetheart roses and colonial knots around but it just didn't look right so I removed the folded roses. I didn't remove the other flowers because I'm going to wait and see if it will work with the other ribbon as well and make a nice bouquet before just ripping it out.
Then I wanted to do some seams...and I remembered Jo in NZ suggested the herringbone/straight stitch/lazy daisy combo and I remembered that I've wanted to do that combo so I put in the herringbone with a lighter shade green silk floss (1 strand) and then added straight stitches in a darker green silk floss (1 strand). Then I added 3 lazy daisy at the tip using the very fine YLI light pink silk floss (1 strand). I also added sweetheart roses in a variegated peachy-pink/ecru 4mm silk ribbon, clear AB beads to the base and tiny size 15 pink seed beads to the base of the lazy daisies.
The next seam I added small Czech fire polished flower beads with a size 15 gold seed bead to the center and then added 2mm silk ribbon leaves using the ribbon stitch.
I'm having trouble with the green patch's seam and I've ripped out a few things because they didn't look right! I'm going to try the current idea of the slanted buttonhole with lazy daisy flowers dripping from it with a bead but I'm not sure that will look good either and may be removed as well. The fabric is getting angry with me and the more I mess with it the more I'm going to need to cover it!
Oh and I added some tiny stone carved hearts to the print! When I added them it made me think that the theme of my block could be "Love Is In The Air"

1 comment:

Thelma said...

I always love looking at your work , you do fantastic stitching. Those strawberries are so neat up above, all of it is eyecandy. You are so talented.