Flowers for Elizabeth embroidered sweet bag: 6 – stitching the pansies, strawberry flower, and butterfly

This ‘Flowers for Elizabeth’ embroidered sweet bag from Issue 51 of Inspirations magazine is gradually coming together. I’m up to stitching the pansies now, plus the white strawberry flower, the green strawberry  and the insect in the middle…. I’ve been busy this week!

I was really pleased with these pansies. They were stitched in a similar way to the strawberries that I did last week – using layers of Satin Stitch padding first on each petal, and then a top layer of Satin Stitch outside the edges of the Split Stitch outlining. The Au Ver a Soie silk thread makes the Satin Stitch come out beautifully smooth.

Just a few Straight Stitch highlights radiating out from the centre of each flower gave them a lot of ‘personality’, along with a French Knot in the centre of each to complete them.

Then I stitched the little green ‘unripe’ strawberry, in the same way that I’d done the larger ones before.

Again, the white strawberry flower and bud were stitched with Satin Stitch padding under the top layer to make the petals nicely rounded….

…with Straight Stitch highlights and a French Knot centre to finish them off.

There’s a kind of ‘Tudor Rose’ flower in the bottom right hand corner of the sweet bag. Not exactly sure what kind of flower it is, but it’s embroidered in the same way as the other flowers, in two rounds of petals.

In the centre of the bag, on the original design by Susan O’Connor, is a moth. I don’t like moths, so I drew a butterfly instead, and then chose my own colours for it.

Here’s the whole bag front so far, so you can see how it all fits together.

Coming on nicely, isn’t it?!

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