Calla Lillies and Cattails

This Permin of Copenhagen embroidery design (no. 63-5607) is worked on a finished piece of fabric (flower spray design is print on the fabric and the woven border is already done). Purchased from artsanddesign.com as a kit, this worked piece is 16 by 32 inches.

I purchased this and two other similar Permin kits at the same time as they were all on sale (paying no more then $15 a kit) and I especially like working on this rustic feeling fabric (62% linen, 38% cotton).

I was surprised that I nearly used up all of the white embroidery thread (stranded cotton) working on the first flower spray. Luckily the color is Snow White (B5200) and I have plenty of it within my stash. Instructions called to work using three strands throughout. I did this (three strands) for the larger lily, not too happy with the heavy look of the stitching I switched to using one or two strands for the rest of the design.

Instructions called to use buttonhole (with long/short fill in stitches) and split stitch. I don’t know if it was the use of three strands but none of my stitching was looking that great to me. I took out all of the three stranded stitching except for the large calla lily and went rogue using one strand for (satin, long/short, bullions) and two strands (often two different color greens) for the leaves and stems. Drizzle and bullion stitches for the flowers use two stash provided strands of orange and yellow.

The cattails are worked using a dark teddy bear brown DMC stranded cotton from my stash along with the browns and orange threads that came with the kit. Having decided to ‘do my own thing with respect to the stitches’ I had started to do a Turkey stitch for the cattails but this fabric is a somewhat loose weave and the weight of the Turkey stitching was too heavy for it so I took those stitches out and did a weaved pattern instead. I was quite happy to see (when I took the Turkey stitching out) that this fabric held up quite well to that work and wasn’t pulled looking after I finished getting those stitches out).

Except for the odd (first time I ran out of thread within a Permin kit) shortage of the white DMC within this kit, I had plenty of thread even though I had a bit of stitch removal. Course with that stitch removal it seemed like I was never going to get that first spray of flowers, leaf and stems done, but I flew though and hence greatly enjoyed doing the second spray.

I’m showing this half done photo to use that second undone part of this runner to show you how it looked when I got it out of the bag.