Corn Flowers and Strawberries - Petal Bag

 

The second panel of the Petal Bag features Corn Flowers and Strawberries.

As I continue on my stitching journey to finish the bag, here are a few more of the steps from thought to completed article.

Once I decided on the basic shape of the bag, I started on the drawings of the sides. It is pretty rough now but lets me know where I want to place the flowers, leaves and other bits. It is at this stage that I go back to my research to figure out final shapes of flowers and leaves. I try and get the number of petals correct and look at colors.

After the design is refined, I pick colors and decide what elements will be stitched on the base fabric and which ones will be cut out and added later. I try to make enough notes on the drawings so I can remember what I intended to do.

I have a wonderful selection of Chinese silk threads. They are a filament silk that is 2 ply and slightly twisted so they are easy to use as is or split when I need a finer thread. I mostly used them as they came with from the skein. There are 100 colors and each color has 5 shades. In some of  them, the color range is a bit more evenly graduated but it does give me lots of colors to choose from anyway.

Each skein is cut into meter long pieces, then braided and folded in a paper to keep it from getting tangled.

After the drawing are finished, I make copies so I can make a mock up of the bag. If the piece is three dimensional then making a roughly finished object will tell you if it is the size and shape that you want. It is much easier to change the drawings than to try to tweak  the stitched pieces.

I decided that the bag would be too big in the size that I had drawn so I made it smaller and then made another mock up and really like the new size. It was much better so I rescaled all of the drawings in the new size.