Remember that originally five-petalled daffodil whose additional petal necessitated the unpicking of already-stitched greenery in Floral Lace 7b? Well, it’s been doing it again – this time the colours aren’t working! *Voice of Reason intervenes and reminds me that as I designed it, it’s all my fault in the first place so I might as well get on with it and put it right without whining about it*

The Voice of Reason is absolutely right, of course. It just illustrates once again how incredibly difficult it is to envisage how colours will work together when you’re working on paper or a computer screen. It doesn’t matter how often you take out your bobbins of stranded cotton or your skeins of perle and put them together to see what the combination looks like, it’s only when you see it stitched that you can tell whether you got it right. In this case I hadn’t. The daffodil has six petals and that trumpet bit in the middle; my idea was for a yellow daffodil with an orange centre. However, if I stitched all the petals in the same yellow, it would just become one big yellow splodge, so I decided to work the petals in two shades of yellow, alternatingly. I chose two that were distinct enough to show up, and set to work.

But as soon as I started the first petal in the darker yellow, I realised that it looked orange, and contrasted far too much with the light yellow petals; also, the trumpet would have to be extremely orange to show up – think DMC 946 or something equally in-your-face. But on the bobbin the next lighter shade seemed almost identical to the light yellow I was already using. I decided to leave the dark yellow/orange petal and stitch another one in the medium shade, to see if it contrasted enough with the lightest petals. And quite unexpectedly, it did! So my next chore is to unpick the dark yellow petal (unpicking cross stitch over one on 25ct is not one of my favourite jobs) and complete the rest of the daffodils in the medium yellow. I still hope to be able to put the completed Daffodil on the website before Christmas, so I’d better get a few long evenings of stitching in!