Stitching with a Shimmy

The finished embroidery

Welcome back! Hopefully the videos helped those of you trying this who were a bit confused about the needlelace leaves. Now that the leaves and petals are finished, we can put it all together!

Step 7 – Completing the Embroidery

1. First things first. We need to get those detached lace leaves off our muslin and Free!!! Turn the work over so the back is up, and carefully clip the couching threads, gently pulling them out to remove them.
2. Now go back to the front and clip the threads close to the away waste knots. The leaf should now come off of the muslin pretty easily.
3. Clip the dangling green threads close to the stitching. You should have secured them when you covered the wire with buttonhole stitch. You did do that, right?
4. Now clip the fabric around the blue petals. I like to do this in two passes. One to separate the petals, and another with very very fine, sharp embroidery scissors (I use the same ones I use for hardanger) to snip the fabric off very close to the stitching.
   Note: At this point I should have taken my navy blue Sharpie and colored in the white muslin fringe and a bit of the tips of the wire. I didn’t. I KNOW this is going to haunt me. I may even end up going back and re-stitching the petals because of it…
5. Put the actual embroidery back into a hoop. Make sure it’s taut.
6. Using an awl, or the points of your sharp scissors, poke a small hole where two of the red petals come together, right down by the base of the french knot center. The hole should be large enough for the wires to go through, but not easily. We don’t want them swishing around wherever they want to go when we’re done!
7. Poke the wires from one of the blue petals through the hole.
8. Repeat steps 6 and 7 for the other three petals.
9. On the back of the work, interlace the petal wires together and secure them by stitching over them. I made a cross and then secured each pair of ends with a few whip stitches. Using your wire cutters or the pair of scissors you don’t care about, clip the wires about a sixteenth of an inch away from the stitching.
10. Referring to the pattern or photos below for location, poke holes next to the stem and poke the leaves’ wires into them. These holes need to be even smaller than the ones for the petals, simply because they aren’t going through stitching as well as the fabric.
11. On the back of the work, secure the wires with small whip stitches and trim them as you did the petals.
12. Congratulations! Your stumpwork is finished! You can bend the wires on the raised portions so that they lay the way you want them to, and then you can now frame it, or finish it as you like. (I’ve got a finishing suggestion in mind for these little pieces coming up soon!)