I’ve always liked the word periwinkle. The flower, too – it’s such a gorgeous shade, and quite an interesting shape with its wedge-shaped petals. But the word periwinkle will always remind me of the television series Keeping Up Appearances, where social snob Hyacinth Bucket/Bouquet was so immensely proud of her "Royal Doulton with hand-painted periwinkles". The Dutch subtitles insisted on translating the word as "alikruikjes", which are the little sea snails that go by the same name, but which you’d be unlikely to find on hand-painted Royal Doulton. The flower is called "maagdenpalm", or "virgin’s palm", a reference to the blue robe of the Virgin Mary.

But I digress.

You may remember that I mentioned periwinkles in my post about woven picots, suggesting that five fairly wide woven picots in blue could be used to create this flower. Well, even at the time I knew that that was not altogether true. With the right shade it might look vaguely like a periwinkle, but you can’t get over the fact that most periwinkles have petals that start narrow and become wider, ending in a relatively flat edge, whereas woven picots go from wide to narrow and end in a point.

Or do they?

Using the basic technique of the woven picot, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t play with the shape a bit. I soon realised that the number of pins required might make your stitching look like an exercise in acupuncture, but of course if you’re not too bothered with the petals being free-standing you can hold the foundation threads in place with a few tiny holding stitches. And so I tried a few experiments.

The first experiment involved working two tiny holding stitches which would for the corners of the flat end of the petal. Having worked those, bring the needle up on one side of where the base of the petal will be, thread through the two tiny stitches, and take the needle down at the other side of the base. Come up again between those two points (so at the centre of the base) and go down at the centre of the top (between the two little holding stitches). Come up just inside the base, and start weaving until you get to the top.

So does it work? Well, the shape is definitely more periwinkle-like, and if you don’t pull the thread to tightly when you are creating the outline, you can lift the finished form away from the fabric a little in a sort of arch. But the flat top is not completely flat because the holding stitches and the central "spine" stick out a bit, and the curve of the petal is not nearly so strong as when you start out with a regular woven picot and attach the tip to the fabric.

For the second experiment I decided to go the pin route – work the woven picot as usual, but have three pins at the top. Come up at one end of the base, loop the working thread around the two corner pins, and go down at the other end of the base. Then come up at the centre of the base and loop the thread around the centre pin. Then weave.

Well, that was the theory. In practice it was very difficult to make the start of the weaving sit very close to the pins, and when the pins were removed the top started to unravel. I suppose I should have seen that coming …

So is it back to the drawing board for the ultimate periwinkle-shaped woven picot? No. Because I suddenly thought of a much easier solution – as the standard woven picots have a flat base, why not simply work them "upside down", that is to say with the tips pointing toward the centre of the flower? Work five of them (folding finished ones back to make room for the later ones), stitch the tips down in the centre, work a pentagon in white backstitch and a single chunky yellow French knot and voilà, a periwinkle!

But does this one work? Well, I haven’t actually got round to trying it yet, but I hope to create a real life specimen within the next week or so.