The flowers around the sides of the spoolholder that I am making from Carolyn Pearce’s ‘Home Sweet Home Workbox’ book are coming along nicely now. These daisies are stitched by working three lazy daisy stitches in a group, all starting from roughly the same point. The centre of each is a French knot, made with two strands and two wraps around a milliners needle.
The forget-me-nots are worked by stitching four granitos stitches, leaving a tiny space in the centre for another French knot.
Lastly, these little blue flowers are worked by stitching five French knots in a circle, and then filling the centre of the circle with a butter-coloured Mill Hill size 11 seed bead. In Carolyn’s book, she suggested using blue flower beads for these flowers. For one thing, I have found it impossible to buy anything remotely like the beads that Carolyn used. Also, I prefer the softer look of these flowers worked mainly in French knots, to possibly chunky-looking beads.
The strange green thing on the left of the image above is the back end of the caterpillar!
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Janet Granger's Blog 
Here via SSS/DDD… It looks lovely! I struggle with french knots (although years ago, I did them just fine)… but they do always look so much more delicate than beads. This really is a lovely piece. 🙂
– Melissa
http://www.measi.net/measiblog/
Hi Melissa,
I find that French knots are much easier to do if you use the correct kind of needle. Milliners needles are great, because they are straight all the way along the length, so the thread doesn’t get entangled as you pull the thread through.
I just saw your embroidery in fb and came to visit your page, Is beautiful and adorable. Congratulations.
Pretty, pretty, pretty!
Both your blue flowers look very nice – French knots and granitos stitches.
I also struggle with French knots, but easily do colonial knots instead.
I agree that the plastic flower bead is too chunky. I found it in a shop, but it looked dreadful when I tried to use it. It looks very nice in the photos in the book though.