Tutorial - Holly Berries / Karácsonyi magyal

Wanting to add some 3D holly berries to the Christmas themed RR block I am working on, I realized that all I had on hand to make them at that moment, was thread and needles (daughter sick, me not able to grab stash from studio)... They say that one of the challenges of crazy quilting is to use what we have, so let's try to get creative. My first idea, the padded satin stitch just didn't give the dimensional result I was looking for, so I decided to try and "close" the raised cup stitch and it worked so well, that I decided to share it with you, too.
Here's a snap shot of my doodle cloth:

There is a great tutorial for the raised cup stitch on Sharon Boggon's blog, Pin Tangle.
Based on that tutorial, I worked a raised cup with two rows/circles of knots (one knot in each space):

After completing the second row, I continued going around, working one knot in every second space of the previous row of stitches, closing up the flower cup shape into a round berry shape.

When I ran out of stitches, I took my needle down through the center of the berry: (taking care not to pull the thread too tightly, because that would have distorted the berry.)

And there it is, a 3D berry, just the shape and texture I was looking for:

It can be completely closed, like in the picture above, or it can have a little opening at the top, as shown below. It all depends on when you decide to stop reducing the stitches:

And here you can see my progress on the RR block, with the holly and berries already in place:

(Additional work by Michele)

I kept calling them berries, because they were the ones who called for this experiment and I think they would work to make any kind of berries, but looking at my doodle cloth, I can see this stitch used to make also hydrangeas, for instance.
Want to give it a try? Please, let me know how it went!

Have fun!