Working On The Lotus Flowers

Last week I posted about my progress on the Lotus Tile Fragment, and commented that I was rather concerned about producing a suitable effect. Remember, the original fragment was described by Mary Chubb as “faintly lilac-tipped”, and my first effort looked distinctly clunky. That wasn’t going to be suitable, because the Amarna-period art of ancient Egypt has a particularly graceful style.

There were a lot of useful suggestions in the comments, and more than one encouraging email conversation as well (thank you all very much!), and I’ve enjoyed experimenting in the week since then.

I’ve now got two lotus flowers using blended thread, and one using solid colour tips, and I can’t quite decide between them.

If it comes to that, I’m not sure whether even I, who stitched them, can tell the difference between the two blended tip flowers! In one case, I simply split my original silk thread in two, and laid the two halves side by side, whereas in the other, I split each half in half again, and reassembled them alternately.

I suppose that if I can’t really tell the difference, that suggests that splitting and reassembling once will be enough. I just need to decide whether to go for blended silk or separate colours.

Decisions, decisions!