Two roses!

I'm in the midst of packing and have taken the opportunity to sort my craft stuff by unfinished projects. If I pack everything else then I can't start a new project, so I *must* finish them! So far, it's working. I had one finished rose and one that just needed a few more minutes of work, so I pulled them out as my first challenge. Now, I've finished my two wool roses! They are a combination of satin stitch, Klosterstich, and stem stitch. They are stitched on linen, using "Designer's Dream" wool from Rainbow Gallery. I posted a picture of the thread palette just for fun. The wool is a very fine wool, which is fairly easy to work with. It's not too fuzzy, but it does tire pretty quickly. The threads are very springy, so you have to be extra careful with stitch tension.

More rose progress

I've finished most of the stitching for the rose! Hooray! I'm very pleased with how it's turning out :)

My current obstacle is that I forgot to buy yellow wool for the center. I didn't even realize it until I finished the outline and was at the "what next"thought. Oh well, I will have to make a trip to the thread store. It's not really a problem if it gives me an excuse to go to the thread store.

One medieval aesthetic that has been a bit hard for me to embrace is outlining in festive colors. My natural instinct is to just always outline in black. I have seen so much beautiful embroidery work with contrasting and festively colored outlines, that I decided to grow as a person - I used white for the outline. I really like the results, it adds to the harmony of the piece. For perspective here is the rose stitched, just before the outline is added. You can see a little bit of the black drawing through, which gives you and idea of how a black outline would have looked - I like the white much better.

Wool roses!

I've had this project sketched out for a while and have finally gotten started on it - wool roses! Racaire has been posting beautiful wool work on her blog for a while and it has inspired me to give it a try. It's a definite shift from all that silk that I like to play with.

I used the pattern from Mary Corbet's blog for her silk Tudor rose project. One day I will try the actual goldwork rose from her blog, but for now I'm just using the drawing.

So, this is my progress thus far. I've finished the fill stitches on the rose. I have just started the outline stitches, but didn't get enough work done on that to make an interesting progress picture. I am slowly getting a feel for the wool and am getting to really like it. I don't know why, but I had a mental image of wool as unruly and messy, but it is starting to look really nice. It even has a soft, fuzzy shine to it that is very nice.