Chrysanthemum stitching is done!

I originally thought I'd use the stumpwork yellow petals I created, for the center of the flower, but now I may change the plan.  I think it's pretty much complete already

 Now to press out the hoop ridge, and decide where this goes next. And where the stumpwork petals might belong.
 

Pent up need to make art...

After a couple of days of being able only to think about making stuff and plan, and feel bored by my vanished energy, and various physical woes, things are looking up today, and I did some work on several fronts.

Here's the state of the chrysanthemum today, not far from completed.  More shading to happen.  I ended up shading it more heavily than I'd planned, but I think it was a good change of plan.

And here's the upcoming series, in larval form.  

At first I had a few line drawings which I thought I'd scan and print on silk. Then I decided I may as well trace as scan.  Then I thought how about instead of silk, using that soluble Vilene fabric for this, and I ended up tracing one drawing onto Vilene, after stretching it, then transferred it, with net sandwiching it, to a hoop.  There I'll do the stitching, with with any luck securing the net, and when I wash out the Vilene, there will be a very airy lacy stitched design on net.  If this works, I plan on a couple more. That way it will be a small series.  At least that's the plan.

I think the doorway series is done now, with three small and one large.  The large one is not far from done, see its current state. There will be Dorset buttons around that archway, mostly stitched now, but since they're white, I'm planning to dye them.

So that's the other thing I did in the studio: study how to go about using my red onion skins to dye some D buttons.  And booking a couple of natural dyeing books from the libe, which I expect I've studied before, every spring I seem to get into this, and digging out an old lidded pot that I can dedicate to dyeing. 

For onionskins it doesn't matter, since they're not toxic, but with other plant dyes it pays not to mix them with food.  Onionskins are good to start with because they don't need a mordant, and the less fuss the better, I think.  Incidentally, there's hardly any smell of onion from them now.

Tomorrow will be my dyeing day...

The chrysanthemum is progressing nicely

Here's the current State of the Mum.  

Since the petals are very filled in and flat (there will be stumpwork petals in the midst of these, though, which you see still on the little hoop to the left) I'm thinking of lightening up on the leaves, and just indicating shapes and shading, not filling them in completely, which will look really opaque and defeat the purpose of this translucent silk.

I've had to devise methods of getting the thread to travel without showing, though, with the split stitch outline: I whipped the thread down the back to a good place to emerge on the front again, so it's invisible from the front, but the thread is where it needs to be for the next part.  This was easy to do, since split stitch leaves a line of stitches on the back that you can easily whip around.

I have two shades of green to work on after the outline is done, and I have to think about the best way to do that.