Making a start on the border..

When last you saw Aethelflaed, I had split-stitch transferred the design onto the border, and made a start on the first barrel.

I am using memories of the barrels that figure so prominently in “Asterix in Britain” to give me an appropriate level of colouring, something not too subtle, but not too clunky either. If I can manage it, I want to have something fairly simple convey a greater level of detail than is really there.

And honestly, I think I might be achieving that. Blending the silk threads stretches out the tones slightly, but the other thing it does is to create some impression of the grain of the wood. It might be a bit too much, too detailled when it’s seen up close, but at any sort of distance, I think it works.

And now, for some record keeping…

I have been slow to learn that I need to keep track of what I’m doing. At various points in the Dreams of Amarna, I had a very bad moment or two when I couldn’t track down the information about something I’d done so that I could do something similar somewhere else. One of the uses of a blog is to keep records!

So far in the border, I have been using four strands of silk in my needle, just as I did in the rest of the piece. For the rose leaves, I’m using eight, four light and four dark. I want them raised over the stems without any sign of the stem behind them.

That seems to be working, too.