Talliaferro Challenge - Part 3

Last week, I had showed you how one petal looked stitched using the couching method.

Liking the look of it, I went ahead and stitched the other side which was a big mistake. The original plan was that the flower would have petals in two shades of red, the darker berry and the bright red you see below. I didn't particularly like the two shades together. I need to learn to do test pieces before I go full speed ahead. I would have realized that they didn't go well together if I had stitched a line of each color side by side.

So out they went. This was slow going.

Fortunately the ground fabric wasn't too affected since I'm stitching on top of felt. I can't say the same for the felt which had to come out.

Since the felt had to come out, I took the opportunity to add an extra layer of felt padding. I did feel that it needed it, so in the end it all worked out :)

Bi-cones were stitched back on with a circle of silver-lined seed beads. As I'm writing this today after having been to the JEC center, I wish I could redo these. I learned the proper way of doing them so they would come out nice and round. Next time :)

Here are my beads all strung up.

I used a pill bottle to control the strung beads but the komas I picked up would have been very useful here.

It's unfortunate the two red shades didn't go nicely together, but it looks great with just one red.

The rest of the petals were stitched like you would a satin stitch, curving along the lines of the felt. To help figure out the angles, I would use a silver Jelly Roll pen to sketch out the lines.

I followed the same stitch all throughout the flower except the center. For this section, I used the leaf stitch technique that was used in De Rose Vêtues.

I really enjoyed stitching the petals. It goes much faster than you would expect as the beads cover more ground than thread. Stitching each petal with beads going in different direction, makes the light hit them at different angles. This makes it sparkle even more.