La Broderie de Perles - De Rose Vêtues Finished

Friday I came home to find not only my bead order from Artbeads is here but also my copy of Inspirations magazine.

And I've already set my sights on another whitework piece ;) This is another Schwalm piece by Deborah Love the same designer as Eidelweiss.

But I digress. So my order of beads coming in means I can go back to working on my bead embroidery piece De Rose Vêtues. The bead I was missing was the green at the middle. I still don't know how I missed it in the first order. I've gone through the beads for the other patterns and double-checked everything so I should be okay now.

The last time I showed this piece I had stitched the pink tulips. I then spent the weekend just staring at it and having the sensation that the color was just wrong.

The sensation quickly turned to dislike as I found the color too close to pepto bismol pink rather than the lovely pastel pink in the original photo.

Luckily when I ordered all the beads, I happened to throw in an extra pink. A habit I find myself doing often when ordering beads ;) The pink is a paler pink than the other one and has a lovely shine to it.

I decided to restitch the flower on the left, since I wasn't very satisfied with it anyways. Side by side, I liked the left one better but just to be on the safe side I decided to put it aside until I got my missing green beads in. That was two weeks ago.

Friday night I started stitching the stems and leaves. This is stitched using the stem stitch. Once I put in the green I was even more convinced that I preferred the pink on the left.

So out came the scissors.

I'm so proud, I was able to do this and not lose a single bead =P When I cut out the left one I lost quite a few to the floor that I was never able to find.

I put in the last bead on Saturday. If I take out the time it took for me to redo each flower twice and the week I had to wait for the beads to come in, this project would have actually taken a day of stitching at most. All the stitches are simple and the beads covered a lot of ground very fast.

Since the piece is so small, I decided to try out a new finishing technique. This is something I've been wanting to do with finishes that I don't want to frame as a frame would be too bulky for storing them. I had even bought an acid free mat board last summer, but I chickened out >.< But after seeing Catherine's blog post it gave me that boost I needed to go forward with the experiment.

I measure out my piece giving a half inch margin on three sides and about an inch at the top and cut a piece of mat. Since my embroidery is already backed with muslin I didn't have to cut another piece to go over the mat board, but I did pull out some fusible wadding. I cut the wadding piece slightly smaller than the mat board so the that embroidery will sit nicely on top of it.

After fusing the wadding to the mat board, I pinned the muslin to the board and started lacing it. I placed a beading mat underneath it so I don't accidentally disturb the beading at the front.

Once it's all been laced, I started stretching and pining the main fabric to the mat board.

I personally like to have the corners mitered. It just comes out much neater that way.

The main fabric is then stitched to the muslin at the back using the Herringbone stitch exactly the same way Catherine did.

I obviously couldn't leave the back like that. Luckily I had a lovely blue-gray satin fabric in my stash. I stitched it to the finished piece using a ladder stitch. The fabric is a little puckered here and there but it looks nice regardless.

The finishing took all afternoon. I think if the piece was bigger I would have done this in stages over a couple of days. I was so tired when I finished framing it that I didn't end up doing anything else that day. Also, I don't think I would use a satin fabric for the backing. It looks lovely but it's very slippery. I'll have to stick to a nice cotton.

I really like how it looks using this finishing technique. I can see why embroidery teachers use it a lot. It's very practical for storage and it looks lovely. I just need to find some acid free plastic sleeves to store it in so it doesn't get dirty.

For this week, I haven't decided what I want to work on. I really want to start another of the bead embroidery patterns from the book, but the next lesson for Pearl Butterfly comes out Thursday. I don't know if it would be practical to start something new. Decisions, decisions...