Rust Red Iris - Half of the Left Petal  

Posted by MeganH in


  • Like the right petal, the left petal naturally divides itself in two. Here's the top of it :-)
  • There is a shadow under that little flap. The book said to use the darkest colour but it stood out too much. I used a dark red instead, and it seems to work ok.
  • I've got some tension problems - below the right petal and to the right of the right bud. I hope they don't stay once I've blocked the embroidery
  • The bottom half of the right petal (the last one I did) looked funny to me with the mixture of light green, dark green, pink and cream. I realized that it was because they were long stitches, whereas the rest of the petal had quite short stitches as an effect of blending the colours so much.
So I took some pink and some cream and put in some small stitches, splitting the long stitches to break them up

  • I'd needed to put a line up the edges of the top petal, because it was merging with the right petal and I've added one on the left to match.
  • For the bottom half of the left petal, which I'm about to do, I actually took the design and marked out the different sections in pencil on the page. Those markings were already on the embroidery itself, but I found a couple of extra, including a shading that I hadn't noticed and a bit of a change in shapes.
I think marking the shapes on the design page is a good idea and I'm going to keep doing it from now on. It's really hard seeing what's happening. The lines are blurred because it's long and short stitch (that's the whole point) but where do you place that basic "cross over" line, especially dealing with odd shapes?

I think adding in this left petal is really making the iris look like more harmonized and is a big step, because it brings the centre into the design, instead of one red petal and a brown centre.

Any comments on why I have the tension problem most welcome.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 24, 2008 at 1:31 AM and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the comments feed .

3 comments

paulahewitt  

Hi Im not sure if this is the reason for the tension problems, but it looks like the fabric isnt uniformly tight in the hoop. It looks like youve attahced extra fabric to the side of the main fabric - perhaps this is stretching or too loose. I hope it is ok when you block it, because the embroidery itself looks great
ps; ive just read your comment on my blog - and yes you can quote or just use it!

March 24, 2008 at 1:44 PM
Elmsley Rose  

The extra fabric is to protect the ground linen since that's where my hand rests (on the left side at least).
It hadn't occurred to me that it'd affect the tension.

Also, one of my cats loves to sit on the frame if she can, so I'm constantly re-tightening it by hand - probably unevenly.

I'm a bit suspicious about the round wooden frame too - it has a crack near the screw - from being overtightened, I assume. However I'm getting a sit on frame soonish, so that should solve a lot of the problems (tho I can just see my cat sitting on top of that!)

Thanks for permission to use the quote. :-)

March 24, 2008 at 1:49 PM
Dragonsally  

I think its looking beautiful!

March 25, 2008 at 3:02 AM

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