SAL: lily bud

Well. I’m still a bit bereft of ideas for how to work the lily bud. Looking at the whole design, I think it needs to be a thin outline (perhaps), with a light filling. This is because the other parts of the design that are nearby have either wide outlines or are completely filled. The next closest bits that have a narrow outline are the pair of leaves right at the bottom.

But then maybe not.

Um…

Ok, so I’m going to try using a stem stitch outline, and see where that takes me. I have used stem stitch already, as the stamen-y bits (I still can’t remember their proper names!), but there is certainly no problem with using a stitch more than once, especially if you use it in different ways. I think I may have said before that some of the best Mountmellick embroidery uses only a limited palette of stitches. It is not an exercise in using as many different stitches as possible… (unlike the embroideries for the covers of my left and right-handed stitch dictionaries, or my embroidery for Stitch+Stitch=Magic!)
I’ve started with the central petal of the bud, outlining it in stem stitch.
Now I’ve worked another line of stem stitch just inside the first.
The completed double stem stitch outline, with the centre vein of the petal worked in running stitch.

Yeah, I’m happy with that.