Cottage Garden Progress

When I woke up this morning my left hip was extremely stiff and sore.  Why, I wondered?  I soon learned that it was from all my embroidery yesterday!  Especially the bullions.  I have been keeping a good grip on all the wraps as I do them, and it seems my whole left side has been involved in the process!  Today I managed to finish the two bottom roses, and now I've had to put it away for the day. But I think it's looking good:

Yesterday, in addition to all my practice bullions, I finished the purple hollyhocks behind the rose bush, placed the centres of the rose bush, added a few more rosettes to the tree, an extra leaf to the hydrangea, and another row of white cyclamen below the tree to bring the lower margin in line.  They still need a few leaves.  I am going to leave a bigger gap between the hydrangea and the rose bush than the pattern calls for, because I don't want to have any of the more fragile stitches like rosettes or bullions on the fold line.

The purple hollyhocks are a rosette stitch/French knot combination...

...while the other hollyhocks were all done in blanket stitch pinwheels:

I'm also going to invent some different flowers to fill in the rest of the right side.  The plan is to try marigolds behind the white cyclamen, and some black-eyed Susans beside them.  Then the whole bottom is underlined with French knot "alyssum," and the outside is done!

The inside is made from a nice pink gingham, with small bullion roses in the centre of the inside front and back.  It's a needlebook, by the way!  I'm going to use it to keep all these loose needles that come with the kits.

The thing that has made the biggest difference for me, compared to the trouble I had before, was taking the project out of the hoop.  It is so much easier to turn the work, and use the left hand as well as the right to manage the thread.  I can't believe how much faster it has been.

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!