With Apologies to Historical Purists

Another small section complete!  A special hurrah since this is a section I've stewed about.  In the original this little stem alternates -- sort of at random -- between ceylon stitch in gold and in ceylon stitch in green silk.  But to my eye that looked really messy. . . so I've adapted again, and done the stem entirely in gold.  I think it works OK.

Here's the stem in process . . . representing one afternoon's work:

And here is the completed stem.  If you look carefully you can see that up towards the top -- near the second pear -- I switched between a 3 and 2 stitch width.  Further down the stem as it widens out, the individual stitches become spaced a little further apart.

I do not have a very good photo of the original,but here's a sort of fuzzy picture of the stem in question.  I think you can at least see how in my mind at least, the alternating green silk and gold creates a rather messy look.

Like Stampeding Snails

Some more very modest progress. . . at a constipated snail's pace . . . but progress nevertheless:

Some fancy footwear done in tightly packed cable chain stitch:

A blue and white butterfly, with detached button hole body and wings of detached buttonhole over silver return:

And, finally, a leaf filled with alternating green silk and gold metallic in cable chain:

So What Exactly IS That?

Going back to the photo ending the previous post (copied below), you can see an odd shape between the two pears.   It's shown really clearly on the traceable pattern sheet.   My question has been, "what exactly is that?"

It doesn't really look like a leaf. . . or a pear. . .  To me it appears very blob-like, which bugs me.  I don't have a good high-res photo of the original piece, but the photo I do have looks pretty much like the traceable pattern.

So what to do about it?  If it were possible, I think I'd make it into a nice leaf shape, but I can't figure out how to do that without leaving a fair amount of the existing outline visible.

The stitching instructions refer to it as a pear.  So maybe it's a pear. . .or could be a pear.  A little sketching on the traceable outline resulted in the following that creates pear-like shape that also covers all the indelible lines.  Here's the new pear drawn in water erasable marker over the blob shape.

And here's the stitched shape, outlined in dark brown to match the other pears (my addition for consistency among my trio of pears) and filled with alternating rows of silver and gold Van Dyke.

So my piece has a trio of pears.   Onto the next problem.

A Pair of Pears

New year. . . same slow stitching pace, I'm afraid.

But some stitching has been done.

This week's accomplishment is the second "woven" gold leaf.  The photo below shows the two pears together.  Both use the same technique -- laid parallel linen threads with the working threads worked over and under as shown in the second photo.  The pear on the left is stitched with gold thread alone.  In the smaller pear on the right, the working thread consists of gold thread plus one strand of colored silk.