I’ve started on a poppy – to give me a break before finishing/fixing the leaves. (on the left there)

The photo shows the 3-Dness of the felt padding really well.

There isn’t any thread padding to be seen – I’ve already embroidered over it.

I found, embroidering on the felt

• I needed to use a definite 90 degree stab method, otherwise the felt ‘pushed’ itself to bulk up to the unembroidered part
• It needed a little haircut after I’d done each layer, as working with it made it a bit fuzzy, and I didn’t want bright red fuzzy bits sticking up through the stitches.

I’ve made two mistakes.

• The first – the left most circle.

With the folding over petal and the dark part that shows of the inner fold  - the topmost *point* of the fold-over needs to meet up with the topmost part of the inner fold

• The circle further down and to the right

I've mucked up the stitch direction on the upper part of the petal. It should have been vertical, not leaning into the centre.

It's given me a 'V" shape in the colouring of the petal.

(there was some kind of brain disconnect between me looking at the photo in the book, which shows stitch direction and me actually doing it. Blame it on the TV programme I was watching at the time. I'm not worried by the mistakes - it's all in the learning :-)

I think that I can fix it by taking out the bottom of the V by adding some more of the medium colour there.

If that doesn't work, I'll have to re-do it.

Or I might just re-do it anyway - taking out the existing stitches, or it'll be way too bulky.

• I also think that the other darkest part (at the top left of the poppy, next to the inner fold-over) needs a few strokes of medium red. (It has the shape of a long ovoid, outside another another long ovoid (petal) that is colour blended, although it doesn't show up very well in the photo)

At the moment it doesn't look very separate to the inner fold-over, apart from the change in the stitch direction of the two, and its like "what is it, what's it doing there?"

It needs to be clearer that it's a petal in it's own right, that's really dark because it's right at the back. Just a few stitches of the medium red, that's all.