Gateau au Chateau Embroidery

 It's been a little bit since I posted, but I have been up to quite a few things the past few weeks. 

I've successfully focused on making many star clips for my shop so I can offer bundles again. I took a break from Garnet Gateau, Bay Area Kei's last virtual event for Valentine's, but I did help out and did a fun embroidery project for one of the panels. 

The finished embroidery piece featuring a mixture of pink and red stitches with a white frame of a house.

I liked the idea of french knots/roses combined in a solid piece, so I took some of the ideas I found via IG and made my own little Gateau au Chateau for fun for the panel. 

Close up of the embroidery project, highlighting the heart flowers at the sides and close up of the bottom of the house stitches

I for once preplanned some of the basic elements, like where I'd make leaves, roses, the heart, chimney, etc. But I ran with some of the elements, like how to outline. 

Highlight of the heart, roof scallop stitches, and chimney

The roof was definitely challenging. I knew I wanted to do scallops but I wasn't sure how to proceed until I did a quick youtube search for a video on scallops in embroidery. It was the first time doing this sort of blanket stitch, let alone a stumpwork version in scalloped form. I had to redo some of the scallops a few times but in the end I got it to look mostly even. 

The first stitches of the project, the blanket scallop stumpwork. They do indeed protrude from the fabric.

Due to the complexity of the weaving element, I did the roof scallops first, so they wouldn't snag the french knots or roses. 

Some progress on the embroidery. Roof is done, heart window is made, and some leaves and flowers are stitched.

I did the heart next, with some of the larger elements like the leaves, where I used the fishbone stitch, and the wagon wheel roses. I ended up deciding to use a lot of perle cotton, which led me to using more strands than I normally preferred with the embroidery floss. 

Establishing straight lines for the walls. As I stitched, I lost sight of my straight walls as I had not stitched the outline until the very end, so I had to adjust a little bit of the stitches at the edges.

Even so, some of the elements ended up disappearing, like the lazy daisies. I think it's mostly due to the perle cotton being so bulky. But it also added a lot of texture. My other mistake was relying on green on green being noticeable. Ultimately, the leaves disappeared in the busy-ness of the different stitches. They were a bit doomed to fail in the first place due to my choice of background fabric. In general, the entire house was a little lopsided too, partially because my initial transfer of the pattern didn't stay on the fabric with chalk so I had to keep redrawing it and then found myself to be a little wobbly with the house walls. There was quite a bit of adjusting being done as I stitched. 

My smoke also wasn't the best, it's not as flowy as I wanted it to be and instead had a bit of a straightness to it when it first comes out of the chimney instead of a more organic line. But in a way, I guess that's how smoke can come out of the source of a flame at first so perhaps I wasn't too off the mark with that. 

All in all, despite the problems, I was pretty pleased with this being my first designed-from-scratch non/kit project in embroidery. Up till now, it's all been kits or directions, or embellishment on original instructions. It was a fun challenge I did on whim. It was a hit at the panel as well, especially due to the color balance and different textures. 

Next time, I think I'll focus on something not so busy. Even though it has all these textures which are delightful in a way, I feel like it's just maybe a tad bit too much. But considering how I've been feeling as I slowly let down from an extremely stressful 50 years (read 4 but still ongoing really so never full letting down), its energy does encompass the chaos of my struggles in recent past pretty well.