It’s inevitable.
At some point in your embroidery journey – maybe at many points, if you’re anything like me – you’re going to make less-than-ideal choices now and then when it comes to embroidery stitches.
Sometimes, stitches you’d think would work in certain circumstances end up being Just Plain Wrong.
You see, I’ve discovered that I’m not the most accurate visualizer. Some people have a real gift for accurately visualizing outcomes, but I’m pretty sure that I don’t really fit that category. Once I’ve latched on to an idea, I have to try the thing to see how it’s going to look.
So I tend to grasp at the first idea of a thing and think Oh! Hey! Yeah! That would be a great idea! … only to find, an hour or so down the road, after trial-and-error-and-error-and-error, that no, it really wasn’t a great idea.
Case in point:
Here we have a floral element on the latest and upcoming Stitch Snippet project, Garden Swirl. It wants a center, that large flower. And I was determined to give it one.
As I thought about the various centers of the various flowers on this piece, it occurred to me that a variety of textures across the piece would be a good idea. After all, we don’t want every flower center to be exactly the same.
And that’s true!
I forgot to remind myself that every flower center doesn’t have to be different, either.
Well, somehow, the idea of turkey work – or ghiordes knot stitch – popped into my head.
This is a stitch that can vary in degrees of hairy, from stringy-hairy to fuzzy-hairy. I pictured in my mind a combination of stringy-hairy and fuzzy-hairy for the center of this flower. And I pictured using yellow touched by a single strand of brown. I thought it might be a good idea to draw some of the brown from the vine into the flower centers here and there.
And that’s as far as my thinking went, before I set about trying it.
Turkey work is a fabulous technique for making fuzzy or hairy elements in embroidery.
But it is, admittedly, rather fiddly, especially when you’re working it in a small space. It took me a little while to fill up the center of the flower with turkey work. (I used three strands of floss, by the way – two yellow, one brown.)
At this point, I was already saying to myself, Self, I don’t think this is going to work out the way you think it’s going to work out.
And yet, forward ho!
After building up the loops of turkey work, I cut them and began the bit-by-bit trimming process.
This is the satisfactory and fun part of turkey work, because, with little bits of trimming, you start to form your filled shape. You can mound your filling quite nicely and get such a soft and fluffy effect.
And at this point, as I cut and started trimming, I said again to myself, Self, I don’t think this is going to work out the way you think it’s going to work out.
Keeeeeeeeep trimming…
Oh dear.
It just kills it. It kills the brightness, openness, and airiness – not just of the one floral element, but of the whole dang piece of embroidery.
It muddied the whole thing.
Turns out, both the stitch choice and the combination of the two colors were not good choices.
I immediately picked out all this stitching – it was very densely stitched – to take a different approach.
It’s a darned good thing I used linen as the ground fabric, by the way! Linen is forgiving! It heals up well when you remove stitches from it.
It may seem like a waste of time – like a chunk of my time just went down the drain, never to be retrieved, for no good purpose – but I did actually learn from it. I’m not likely to make that particular type of choice in these particular circumstances on this particular type of design again.
But that doesn’t mean I won’t make a different poor choice on a different type of design in different circumstances on a different day.
It’s just part of the journey!
Have a lovely weekend!
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