Experiment 2

One of the things I wasn't very good at on my first try was keeping stem stitch edging smooth. To practice that and expand my vocabulary of stitch patterns I sewed some random wiggly lines and then filled in the gaps between them with patterns I had not used before.

Inadvertently this exercise flagged up the way to shade with blackwork which I have not tried yet, using patterns with different weights of stitches to make dark and light areas. Here you can see that the central and bottom right blocks are noticeably darker than the others. The large lace pattern and bottom left block are also very slightly darker in tone than the other three but that is much less noticeable. The exercise also shows that outlines seem to work much better when using this kind of flat bock shading than the more naturalistic kind. Definitely something I need to come back to at some point.