Design flaw

Oops. I have been having difficulty coming up with a design for the second blackwork leaf because I don't want them to be symmetrical. Leaves need to point downwards or they look strange and trying to have the main stem direction downwards to distinguish it from the other design leads to the problem that the central line of the leaf has to go up and over which takes up more space. That probably wasn't very clear but if we look at these designs you should see what I mean:

It just doesn't look realistic. Eventually I came up with what I thought was a viable option:

As you can see there were various problems with exactly where the join of the stem should go but it all fits in the space and is in the right proportions so I was happy. Then I started to sew and a problem emerged:

Where the stem is almost vertical the shading doesn't work properly. Instead of lots of short lines you get a few very long ones which don't move with the curves of the stem. Obviously I have to go back to the drawing board. For the shading to work the stem can't be at more than about a 45 degree angle at any point and the pre-existing join point combined with the need to shape the leaf in a certain way makes that very difficult. One possible solution would be to rotate the fabric relative to the design but I haven't quite worked out what the other implications of that would be and I am running out of scraps of fabric so I will go away and think about it.