Challenging

Challenging. That's how it's been to stitch the Royal Persian Blossom vine drop and vine twist shapes. I worked the large section of the vine drops four different times to get it right. I didn't completely rework it four times, but I did start over four times.It's a complicated shape with complicated shading. It looks so beautiful in the photograph and of course the instructions make it sound like a snap. Ha! I was so thankful for my RSN training on long and short shading. Even with that knowledge and experience, I still had to redo it.There were two distinct challenges: first, stitch length and second, color placement.The shape is curved and the curve isn't very gentle. It looks gentle, but when you begin stitching it you find that it turns quite a lot over a short distance. This means that the "long" stitch of long and short shading need to be pretty short. Remember the tip I shared that the short stitches in long and short change the direction? I needed to do a lot of shorter stitches to keep the flow of the curve going. That was the first difficulty: my stitches were too long and didn't curve with the shape enough.  So out it came.The second challenge was the shading. This shape doesn't simply move from a darker to a lighter shade from the top to the bottom. There are areas of darker stitching along the edges to mimic the shadow created by the overlapping shapes and those were quite tricky to get just right. I drew in the shapes provided on the instructions and followed them, which did help.Unfortunately, I followed them TOO closely and it ended up looking like blocks of color rather that shaded colors flowing smoothly together. That wasn't difficult to remedy. I took it all out and started again. This time I paid more attention to letting my needle make shading within the shape but exactly on the lines I'd drawn to guide me. It worked much better.The two vine twist sections, which are smaller and far less complicated, went smoothly. The darker shading is on the outer edges with the very lightest in the middle. One side and the areas between each of the twists has the very darkest shading, so that that section seems to be in shadow. It's brilliant shading and I learned a lot from doing it.The end result I'm (finally) really happy with. One thing that would have helped me enormously are close up shots of the finished piece. Although the stitch instructions are quite good, a close up photo of the actual finished stitching in this particular section would have been really valuable. There is no reference to stitch length in the instruction and that was what I needed to work out for myself.As I work, I'm paying close attention to how the design is constructed, the shapes and the stitches. I think this is one classy piece and I only wish I could design something this beautiful sometime in the future.