Lotus Flower Coat – Difficulties!

My idea for the stitching on the Lotus Flower Coat is that the petals will be filled with chain and feather stitch variations in a variety of threads and shades. White and cream for inside petals, white and cream with some lilac and pink on the outside petals and the half open flowers. I have plans for the leaves and stems, but we all know how my projects change under my feet!

This – one of the small petal tips that show the inside – shows how this developed in the early stages. I think the tapestry wool is too heavy, so that’s coming out.

Mindful of the difficulties I sometimes have with repetition, I decided to work across the whole open flower at once, and at the point of writing, it had got to this, on the right. And at this point, I rather lost my nerve. I wasn’t sure what was wrong, or why, I was just rather unhappy with it.

So I decided to try an entirely different approach on one of the half open flowers, to see whether that helped at all.

It has. I don’t like this at all, heavy, clumsy, not at all conveying the sense of enchantment I have from looking at my assorted source materials, or the sense of enchantment Mary Chubb describes in her first encounter with the Lotus Tile Fragment.

Look, I said that Dreams of Amarna had come to a satisfying and coherent conclusion – I never said that it would never guide my needle again!