Yosemite Dogwood

Click to enlarge.The design is called Sharon’s Yosemite Dogwood. The design is a 2.5 x 3.5 inch oval and pre-printed on ivory trigger cloth.

My sister gave this design to me as a kit purchased from the Nordic Needle web site. This kit did not include the thread but did included five fresh water pearls to be used as the dogwood buds.

The stitches used are long-short straight stitches, bullions, cast-ons, Palestrina, stem stitch, leaf stitch and French knots.

The design can be finished as a card insert (ivory card included in the kit). I choice to insert it into a dark blue window card that I had on hand.

You need to supply the threads and needles. My sister gave me these EdMar threads: Iris: 50, 326; Glory: 50, 84, 114; Lola: 84
DMC Floss: 3781

I steamed the Glory 84 and the Lola 84 (which is vanilla to pale pearl in color) to get the flat, non-curly appearance for the satin stitched bracts of the dogwood flower.

I used a 5 inch long straw needle for creating the 50 wrapped bullions (two each side of the four bracts using the Lola 84).

I didn’t feel that the ivory color trigger fabric popped the colors of the thread very well. So I printed out a pale blue color on printable fabric (Extrav Organza Silk For Inkjet Printing) and overlayed the design printed fabric with the blue color organza.

Instead of using the five pearls for the Dogwood buds I choose to use the Edmar Glory thread (color 84) and create the buds using double-cast on stitches.