Working on Rosa's Block

This weekend I have been working on Rosa's block for the CQI Novice Anything Goes Round Robin. Rosa's block is all sunflowers and autumn so I have been trying to stay with that theme.

As soon as I saw the block I knew the first thing I wanted to attempt was the sunflower from Pat Trott's wonderful Three-Dimensional Embroidery Stitches book. This sunflower included three stitches new to me: Palestrina knot stitch for the stem, woven picots for the petals and raised leaves. These leaves are the coolest stitch and I will be using them a lor from now on! I also enjoyed the woven picots and can see where they will be very useful in a lot of applications. The center of the sunflower is good old french knots. The second motif I did for Rosa is a bunch of wheat. This time I just winged it - found a photo of wheat that I liked and then used stem stitch, bullions and straight stitch to replicate the photo and tied it together with some silk ribbon. I took license with the photo since I am very fond of bearded grain from my brief dabbling into wheat weaving years ago so I added the beards to the kernels of grain. I'm pretty happy with how it all worked so far - hope Rosa will like it too! I have another motif I will be working on today and then a few seams and it will be ready for the mail, hopefully about the same time the weather breaks here. We are having a week of winter weather here in April, cold temperatures, lots of snow and treacherous road conditions - a great time to stay home and stitch!

Comments

Thelma said…

You done such beautiful work..Love the sunflower and wheat..I have got to sit down and learn the bullion stitch,,,so much you can do with that stitch.

April 26, 2008 at 5:52 AM

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