2nd try at blackwork

In spite of the issues with doing blackwork on adia that I discovered when doing the flower I have decided to continue to experiment on the scraps of fabric I already have for a bit rather than buying a big bit of evenweave. Therefore, I am going to sew a leaf to go on each side of the flower leading on from the stem. For the first one I drew another rough sketch on scrap paper:

You can see where I tried to indicate areas of shading. The shading on the top half didn't work so for the real thing I changed it to a teardrop shape like on the lower half. Mindful of the fact I didn't like how dark the flower looked I decided that the areas inside the shading teardrop should be lighter, have some stitches removed, rather than just shading by using more stitches and thicker thread. This is how it turned out:

The stem is again done with two thicknesses of chain stitch and some straight shading stitches, as is the vein down the centre of the leaf. This time the two stitch patterns I used were not multi-directional, the one on the lower half is vertical and the upper half is horizontal, both are copied from the Stitch Guide without needing to be adapted for the fabric type. Again the shading is from two to one threads but this time the darker areas are around the edge and the lightest areas have a stitch removed from the centre of each repetition of the pattern to create white spaces. This kind of shading is much more effective, the difference between the three shades is clearer than on the flower where the two darker shades were difficult to distinguish, especially on the lower half of the leaf where the repeating pattern was smaller. However, I can take it further and loose more stitches to create even lighter areas for a more dramatic image. I also prefer the lack of a hard stem stitch edge so I will do that again on the other leaf.

The two pieces together look like this:

The idea is that with the second leaf they will form a triptych seen through circular gaps in a single mounting board. Each design is approximately 4 inches across so the group should fit into a standard three photo frame to form a sampler of blackwork stitches. Then the real experimentation will begin.