Playing with Flox 3 – a couple of missteps
Flox is quite an odd thread to use. It’s tough and almost wiry. I love the shine and brilliance of the colours, but even the fairly loosely woven fabric I chose was a little bit too closely woven for the thread. I had rather a battle with it, and it was a bit tricky to find stitches I liked the look of. I’ve ended up using a very small selection of stitches – chain stitch, stem stitch, French Knots, and fly stitches.
The pink fly stitches on the frilly flower, I decided, were a bad choice. I’ve no quarrel with the stitch, but pink beside the apricot/ orange of the six-petalled stitches looked wrong, too congested and overheated and all in all, Just Wrong. Amid much muttering, and no little anxiety (dear heaven, I’m not used to playing thread chicken to this extent any more!!), out they came.
I replaced them with two shades of blue – much better!
The final flowers were the bell shaped flowers. I did wonder about working them with a full-coverage stitch, such as Romanian Couching or something like it. You can see in the picture at the right that I tried a fully stitched bell. That came out two. But then I discovered that my two pinks were slightly different shades, like the oranges. So I’ve deployed the two shades to eke out my thread a little.
I did the same with the six petalled flowers – each of the four is a different combination of thread shades.
I think you’ve managed very well with the Flox. It’s a rather clumsy thread, from what I’ve seen. I am not good at bold stitching, or that style of embroidery which used to be so popular for chairbacks and cushion covers when I was tiny.
Looking lovely – those different shades are working well.
I think flox is a tricky thread to use and have little experience of it.
Yes, the choice of colours and the placements of the them in a bouquet like this can be hard. You have made good progress.
I sometimes find that bees wax can tame a difficult thread. The flowers look lovely.
Looks good – working with such a different thread from what you’re used to is bound to pose some new challenges but looks to me like you’ve overcome them nicely!
I don’t think I would have the patience to work with such a tricky thread nowadays.