Stem Stitch Rose with Knotted Center - Tutorial

Today's stitching time was spent playing with a couple of stitches in the company of one of my favorite embroidery books and my doodle cloth. 

The book is written in Japanese, so I can't make out a word from the instructions, but the photos and diagrams are almost sufficient to understand the stitches. Almost. To make out the rest of the "secrets", there's always the doodle cloth :)

There was a cute little flower in the book, starting with some sort of a knot (if you know its proper name, please drop me a note, thank you) that I wanted to try out. Loved the way it turned out, added a few stem stitches to it, and there it was, a lovely, delicate rose, stitched with 6 strands of pink variegated DMC stranded cotton:

To stitch this rose first imagine (ha!) a small square, as marked on the photo below. 

Bring your needle up in 1 and take it down in 2.

Come up in 3, and you will get a small straight stitch:

The next stitch will not go through the fabric, but under the straight stitch: bring your working thread down over the straight stitch and slide your needle under the straight stitch, pulling to the left of your working thread.

Then slide your needle under the straight stitch again, over the working thread, pull your thread through to form a knot

and take your needle down in 4 (the upper right corner of our imaginary square).

Now you have a lovely knot, which can stand by itself as a small flower, for instance, or as a filling stitch along with French and colonial knots.

Or you can take it forward, by bringing your needle up between 3 and 4 (the center of the top line)

And making loops by sliding the needle under the little "legs" of the knot and over the working thread (just like stem stitching except not through the fabric) weaving all around the four "legs"

When you have woven the fourth leg, you could take your needle down again in the center of the upper line, (just where you came up to make the loops) and you would have a smaller rose,

or you could make a bigger rose, by adding more petals - stem stitching around your rose until it gets to the desired size:

When you have enough petals, finish your rose by bringing your needle down to the back of the fabric at an angle as shown in the photo below

and start making another rose

and then another one...

Isn't this fun?!

Oops, maybe I got a little carried away LOL

In the next post I'll show you how I stitched little rose buds, starting with the same knot as the rose and some cute leaves, too. 

Hope you are having a fun day, Everyone!