Finally

Having been rubbish about sewing for the summer and autumn I have finally had a chance to get started again and am continuing with the sampler for my mother's (now very late) birthday present. At the same time I am still experimenting with shading so this time I tried splitting the stitch pattern into two sections completed at different times:

First I did the basic outline of the pattern, shading it as normal where I wanted the darker and lighter sections to be. Then I went back and filled in the other detail stitches, also graduating thickness, and broke up this section of the pattern to create the lightest sections. This technique is definitely far more flexible for quick shading than trying to do it all at once and makes it less easy to miss count and mess up but the contrast is too great. Looking at the whole thing the shading seems too fast so there are lines of dark and no grey:

In spite of that I think this is something to have another go at anyway because the flexibility is such that it should be easy to correct the issues.