There was so much preparation for my Royal School of Needlework (RSN) Certificate botanical silk shading project, that I wrote two blog posts about it! You can catch up on the preparation work here and here. Now with all that preparation done, I was finally ready to start the stitching of my botanical silk shading for real!

The Stem

I started out with the stem since that sits behind both the petal and the leaf.

My tutor had warned me that stems have a tendency to grow when you stitch them. I’d certainly seen this to be true when I did my sampling for the stem. Despite that practice, the stem still turned out a little wider than I would have liked.

Ah well, live and learn I guess! And if you’re stitching a stem that you want to keep nice and narrow my advice would be to make the outline that you transfer to your fabric much thinner than you think it should be!!

Despite that, I felt it was a decent start with getting used to blending the different colours.

Starting the flower – split stitch

Given that the petal and the leaf don’t overlap, I could have started on either of them next. To my understanding there’s different schools of thought on which to tackle first.

I suspect that students are often advised to start with a leaf. As that gives you a chance to practise on a ‘lower stakes’ part of the design since the flower is usually the star of the show.

However, my tutor got me started on the petal first. I suspect this is because my leaf has some ‘interesting’ twisting and turning to contend with!

My first bit of petal stitching was a line of split stitch around the outside edge of the petal.

I’ve had to go super zoomed in on this photo for you to see it! Split stitch with 1 strand of cotton sure is small!

As you can see, I’ve stitched the split stitch right on the edge of my design outline. That’s because you don’t want any of the outline to show through after you’ve finished stitching.

The First Row of Long and Short Stitch

With my split stitch edge created, I could now start the first row of long and short stitch.

As with all silk shading, the direction of your stitches is really important. So I added some stitch direction guidelines inside the petal with an HB pencil.

For this first row of stitching, I found there was quite a lot to think about already!

I needed to get the colour changes right as I swept around the petal. I needed to smoothly change the angle of my stitches as I worked around the edge. All while keeping the edge super neat and tidy and ensuring that I don’t leave any gaps between my stitches. AND avoiding stitches overlapping and criss-crossing each other.

Phew!

As you can see, I had quite a variety of colours to use already.

Also, it doesn’t look like I did a very good job of creating different length stitches! This is at least partly because I did work some shorter stitches, but they’re hidden by the changing direction of the longer stitches. I also didn’t want to go too short as that wouldn’t leave me with much choice of where to start the next line of stitching.

In case you’re wondering why I didn’t extend my split stitch outline all the way around the petal edge yet… Just to the right of where I stopped, the edge of the petal gets very light. So I think I’m going to need to switch to a lighter shade for that split stitch to ensure it doesn’t show through after I’ve stitched.

Since stitching up to the point I did gives me plenty of the petal to work on, I figured it was a good start! I also didn’t want to get too far ahead of myself before my tutor had a chance to review my stitching.

Getting into the flow and figuring out thread management for silk shading

Near the tip of my petal, the colour changes from dark to light quite abruptly because there’s a highlight on the shiny petal.

I quickly learnt that I had to accept that it’s going to look a bit ‘wrong’ at first. This is because your stitches extend further than the colour, so that you can then stitch into them with your next colour.

I took quite regular progress photos at this point, so you can see how quickly the look of it changes.

You may notice from the photos that I quickly developed a system for keeping track of my threads. Since you’re working with a number of different ‘active’ threads at the same time, I find it could quickly get confusing.

So my system was for each thread to have its own parking spot. The order of my parked threads matches the order of my thread spools (I have them threaded through a piece of string) so that it’s relatively easy to keep a track of them.

First bit of reverse stitching

After I’d left my stitching for a couple of days, I really wasn’t happy with the highlight.

So out came my stitching!

It was obviously a bit of a pain to do this. But I think the highlight is a really important part of the design for making the petal look realistic. So it was worth correcting.

This is where I got to before my next class.

I figured this was a good amount of stitching to get feedback on. But also not so much that it would be soul destroying to unpick if my tutor told me I’d got it all wrong!

Luckily, my tutor said I was generally on the right track and so encouraged me to just keep going during the class.

I got so into the swing of it during class that I didn’t take very many progress photos as I went I’m afraid. But here’s one. I found it both slightly daunting and satisfying to get started on those stripes of colour on the right hand side!

This is where I was up to by the end of the day.

I left the class feeling like I’d made a really good start on the petal. Plus I had plenty of useful tips and advice from my tutor for carrying on with this botanical silk shading project at home.

Watch this space for further updates!

I’d love to know what you think of silk shading. Talking to students on my course, it seems to be a bit of a love it or loathe it technique! Which camp are you?