Last time I mentioned my little embroidered Tudor rose in silk and real metal threads, it was almost finished. “Almost” when working on something like this doesn’t necessarily mean that it will be finished “shortly.” Taking the rose from the almost finished state to complete took several hours. But at long last, it was finished, and here it is:

I’m satisfied with the result. There’s a little burble of a problem on it, but it’s not too easy to see. I’ll be more careful about the join on the stretched pearl purl around the center area the next time. It was a somewhat sloppy join, but the solution for it, after pinching and prodding with tweezers and mellore until I was angry, the threads were angry, and a virtual shouting match was going on in my head between the threads and me, was to take it out. And at that point, I figured it wasn’t All That Bad of a Join. I can live with it.

I’ll show you how I worked this little project step-by-step in the near-ish future. I will admit it was not an easy element to do. Sure, the stitching concepts are really not that hard – you’re looking at satin stitch, long and short stitch, couching, and stem stitch. That’s it. But because the piece is very small, and because accuracy is required for a decent outcome, it was a somewhat intense little project.

Just for the fun of it, another scale shot.

I had a question from a reader about my choice to go from light in the center to dark on the outside on this piece, instead of visa-versa. I also had a question or comment about the minimal use of pink. To address both of those points and attempt to justify my choice of colors here, the decision process went something like this:

The outer ring of red petals is too small for successful shading with the thread I was using, so they had to be a solid color. I could have mimicked shading by adding a line of stem stitch along the gold inside edge (at the outermost extreme of the colored part of the outside petal), but if I did that, the color choice for the outside petal would have to be the “medium” tone, which is pink.

I contemplated this path. I contemplated the pink. I stitched a small sample petal with the pink.

And I rebelled against the pink. It was too pink. It simpered, “I am a pink rose.” I wanted it to boldly and authoritatively assert, “I am a red rose.”

So the outside petals being red, the next followed the choice to shade the inside petals from dark on the outside to light in the middle. This could have been reversed, but I wanted the gold to always come in contact with red, because the contrast is more striking. The gold in contact with the pink was somewhat soft. In contrast with the red, it became rich and bold.

Concerning the minimal use of pink in the blend between the red and the cream center in the long and short stitch section, what I considered was carrying the color change as quickly as possible to the contrasting extremes. There is no room inside the petals for a lot of gradual shading. So the pink is there just to form a minimal transition between the red and the cream.

That’s what my color choices and arrangements were based on, but if you’re keen to stitch this Tudor rose and follow along with the tutorial once I get it up (!), you can choose and arrange your colors differently, to produce a variety of different effects.

Up later this week, I’ll give you the Tudor rose pattern and begin to show you step-by-step my process on this piece. I’ve also been working on some other photo tutorials similar to the two-colored daisy stitch tutorials I posted last week, for variety in your flower stitching. I’ve got a couple books to review, but only one in the queue for this week. And of course, the odd tidbit that may pop up!

Looking forward to the week, and I hope you are, too! Have a swell Monday!