The largest flower on the Secret Garden embroidery project is giving me some concern.

In short, I’m doing the Miss Clavel thing again: Something is not right.

It’s not the satin stitching…it’s not the seed stitching…so what is it?

Here’s the flower in question at an angle. From here, it’s not too bad. But let’s look at it upright, shall we?

Do you know what it is, now that you can see it upright?

The pistil stitches are slanting in the wrong directions between each petal! I’m not sure what I was thinking as I stitched those – or whether or not the fact that I was working with the frame sideways on the frame clamp skewed my perspective. But whatever the case, I’ll be picking those out.

This is a good lesson on how stitch direction can make a huge difference in embroidery. Overall, true, this probably wouldn’t be noticed in the scheme of the whole piece. But when you look individually at that flower, you can see that something isn’t quite right, even if you can’t quite pick up on what it is.

But – it’s not a big deal to fix it. That area, worked in a combination of pistil stitch and straight stitches and French knots, works up very quickly. It’ll take longer for me to pick the area clean than it will to put the stitches back in.

One point to note about this particular flower is that the flower itself is not symmetrical. One side of the center sports three petals and the other, two.

It makes a difference in the way the flower looks stitched, especially if you’ve been working with a certain Symmetricality (yes, I made that word up) on your mind. Don’t be taken by surprise by it when you get to that point, if you’re stitching along on the project.

Since this flower is quite a bit larger than all the others, I did something a little different with the seed stitching, too.

Can you see what it is? It’s a subtle difference, maybe not that noticeable, but I like the effect.

Here it is again. See it? I changed the shades within each petal on the flower, graduating from lighter seed stitches towards the top of the petals and darker towards the base.

One other thing I might adjust while I’m adjusting the pistil stitches is the stem stitch outline on the center petal. Right now, it’s stem stitched in the lightest shade on the flower, but I think the separation between the petals could use some better definition there.

Finally, to put it all in perspective:

There’s the whole piece, up to this point.

When you put the piece in perspective from a little farther back, the flowers don’t look quite as large! They balance nicely in the green, adding a touch of color, but not a lot of dominating color. The hummingbirds are going to make the bigger splash, which is as it should be!

Questions? Comments? Suggestions? I’m all ears! Feel free to have your say below!

If you’d like to follow along with the Secret Garden Hummingbirds project, you can find all the articles relating to this project arranged in chronological order in the Secret Garden Project Index.