You may remember my two cream/white on green and blue Round Dozen variations which gave me an idea for some Wedgwood-inspired idea, although really I should call them Jasper, as that type of Wedgwood is known as jasperware. The two variations were stitched on 28ct Jobelan, and I wanted to stitch the new designs on my usual 25ct Lugana. Unfortunately, being made by two different manufacturers they don’t come in the same colours, and all I could find was a rather paler moss green, and a rather brighter blue. Lugana does come in a shade called Wedgwood Blue, but that is lighter than I had in mind, and when I looked into jasperware a bit more I found that the Lugana shades I’d picked were actually closer to the pottery than the Jobelan used for the variations!

So I started designing and at the end of the afternoon somehow ended up with three instead of two designs. Fortunately there is pink jasperware too .

Floral Lace is coming along nicely, but I wasn’t absolutely sure that some of the small cross stitch motifs would work as charted, so I tried them out on a spare piece of material for shape and colour. This turned out to be quite useful as it showed me that the alternatives I’d charted for my corner tulip didn’t look nearly so nice as the first draft (I’d worried that the top of the tulip looked rather flat as originally charted. It didn’t.) and also that the colours of the tulips were far too dark. I eventually went with pinks that were much brighter than I at first intended, but in real life they just look a lot better.

Some things, however, you can’t tell even from a trial piece because it’s not the individual motifs but the way they work together that is the probem. In the picture above there are two identically-shaped smaller blue motifs, one with more dark blue and one with more light blue. My first draft used the darker version, but after stitching it I felt it looked a bit too dark. I re-charted and stitched a lighter version next to it. It looked much nicer so I decided to go with that one. I stitched all the larger blue corner motifs first, then the dark-blue centers of the smaller motifs, and then I completed them with light blue.

When I’d completed one corner of the design, both my husband and I felt that it looked too cluttered and chunky, whereas the unfinished corners with their small bits of dark blue actually looked rather more elegant. But I didn’t like the shape and distribution of them. What if I made them smaller still, and added a third in the middle so that they formed a shallow arch curving in the opposite direction of the beads in that quarter? The picture shows the original corner (top left), two corners with the dark blue of the original motifs (top right and bottom left) and the new design with three tiny dark blue flowers arching around the corner motif (bottom right). It took a lot of unpicking, but all corners now use that last version and I think the design looks much lighter for it. But you’ll have to wait and see what the final result looks like!

Designing doesn’t always happen intentionally. Floral Lace started out as a set of three designs but rather unexpectedly acquired a fourth when I thought of a small cross stitch pansy design. I charted a diagonal corner design and an upright one, which was going to be used on either side of the corner pansy. But I soon realised, even on paper, that it would suffer from the same cluttered feeling as the blue Floral Lace, so I designed a teeny-weeny pansy (at six stitches in total it’s so small it’s hardly recognisable as a flower, but it uses some of the same colours) and hope that that will look more balanced. Watch this space…