Silversands: Wildflower–Ribbon & Stump work Panel 1 part 2

Panel 1 - Part 2
I apologise for the photos, the light was weird in the lounge today even putting lights on didn't help.

So we left the panel with the Aloe's complete except for a bit of tidying up of the free floating wire stems.
And today we are looking at Woven picots for the leaves, French Knots for the ground & The Silver spider's web.

I am using Anchor 214 Perle for the leaves,

My book does not give you a thread list, and actively encourages you to use your own threads although it does give a colour swatch for each panel so you can match your own threads, ribbons, charms etc..

So To start with a woven picot, it is easy once you get the hang of it. :)

Take a long needle, I use my doll making needle and slide it in to the fabric from the tip to the base of the leaf in the centre like this

bring your needle up at A take it anticlockwise round the top of the doll needle & bring it down at B

Bring it up at C and take it clockwise round the top of the doll needle

then slide the needle over the centre stitch you just made & under the left hand stitch, then weave it over the left hand & under the middle, over the right hand, going back & forth until you get to the bottom, keep the stitches close together by sliding them up. To keep the shape of the leaf, I pin both sides out to the shape of the leaf drawn on the fabric and weave down to the pin, remove it and carry on. As you make the turns with each line, don't pull to tight as your squash the width of the stitch which you want to be as wide as the design.

The End result looks like this (I probably did not explain to well above)

Now you notice this leaf is now free standing, this is good, it moves so you can move it while you work, it means when all of them are done you can just tack them down with a couple of stitches, you can give each leaf a twist, but most of all you can cover your pencil marks. I found pinning each one back gave me more room to complete the ones hidden underneath

Ending with this

So now I used some DMC in a matching colour and just tacked each leaf down with a stitch top middle & bottom, spreading them out to cover the design.

So other than French knots & seed stitches under the Aloe its all but done, but I then moved on to the Spider web.
As I said before, I ordered some spider charms, they wont get here till end of march so that will be added later, but the spider web is easy.

I came up in the middle of the white space using 2 strands of metallic thread (Hemline silver sewing thread)and took one long stitch to the aloe came up in the same stitch in the middle and made long stitch spokes. Then used long stitch to do the inner spokes. The thread split slightly but the spider will cover that so I'm not too worried.

Once the web was complete I added some French knots below the aloe, using 2 & 3 wraps to the knot and 1 & 2 threads using DMC 420. The seed stitches (which is 1 back stitch) are also DMC420 and scattered about. Just to give the ground some depth.