Thursday, July 12, 2012

Bullion Rose Practice

Cynthia Gilbreth has been doing the cutest project with a ton of bullions, so I have been feeling for a while now that it is time for me to master this stitch!  I have always felt that it was the most impressive, and most intimidating stitch.  I have done them in the past, but if they turned out it always felt more like a strange fluke than something I had any control over.

This week I've been practicing them again, and today I finally got it all together into a reasonable rose:


My first one!  You can see that the very last bullion came unwrapped a bit at 12 o'clock, but overall I am very pleased with it (and myself!).  So I finally felt empowered enough to get back into my Cottage Garden UFO, which is a design by Kris Richards from Inspirations 53.  This is how it looked at the beginning of this year:


This has been a UFO for several years, because I ran into some problems and couldn't think how to fix them.  I freehand copied the design in pencil directly onto the fabric, and you can see that the bottom edge slants up to the right.  The pencil also rubbed off as I worked, so I was going to have to redraw the rose bush that goes in the space there beside the hydrangea.  You can see it in the original from the magazine:


I was stressing about that rose bush, partially because of the bullions, but also because the design seemed weird to me.  There are purple hollyhocks woven between the roses, and I just didn't like it.  I wanted a little more definition between the foreground and the background.  The pink daisies in the lower left corner had the same issue.  I decided to move the hollyhocks to the back, the roses to the front, and remove the pink daisies entirely.

I had already decided in February to redo the orange daisies as well, which I had made too small.  I did the rosette stitches in the tree back then too.  So this is how it looked this morning:


I have made tons of progress since then, which hopefully I'll show you tomorrow!

6 comments:

  1. I take your point and admire your persistence to get it right. I've experienced similar perspective problems with garden arrangements, but never stopped to fix them.
    It's looking good!

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  2. Thanks Jillian! I don't know if persistence is the right word. It's more that I can't bring myself to do it at all if it feels wrong. Maybe that is perfectionism! Which can be bad or good, depending on the situation. ;)

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  3. I have a love/hate relationship with the bullion stitch, too. I have managed to make a few passable ones and some very, very bad ones as well. Yours look great! And sometimes it takes the passage of time and a fresh look at a sidelined project to figure out how to fix it and to summon up the energy to do so.

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  4. Thanks Mary Ellen. I'm also planning to put some bullion roses on Sedona Star, so I really needed to get them figured out!

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  5. Hi Monica! Thanks for the plug!

    You project is coming along very nicely. I love bullions, but they don't always love me. They sure take a great deal of practice. I only have two more on that project to go, then I can start on construction.

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  6. Credit where credit is due, Cynthia! You certainly inspired me. :)

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I'm told Blogger has been bouncing some comments, so if it happens to you I'm sorry! But the settings look right so I can't explain it. In any case, thanks for reading!

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