Bonjour, Mon Amis!

Last week I finally finished this little canvas of the French hotel.

After doing all the architectural elements, I was able to get to stitch the fun dimensional stuff --the flowers! Here's a close-up of my flower boxes:


I stitched the foliage with variegated greens; first the dark to medium greens, then a lighter green on top.... all in very haphazard lazy daisy stitches going every which way.

Then I added the flowers on top, using two pink Ribbon Floss colors. I made large french knots (three wraps around the needle) so the flowers would be big and floppy. For the flowers above the hotel sign, I added smaller french knots (only one wrap around the needle) in pale yellow Ribbon Floss. The canvas actually only had greenery above the sign, but I decided to add a little bit of soft yellow so there were even MORE flowers on the canvas.

Notice how I made a doornob using gold beads... I really like the look of this polished addition! And if you look carefully on the windows, you can see a few diagonal stitches I placed on top, after I stitched both windows in plain ol' tent stitch. It just looked like a window screen, so I decided to try adding some random slashes of silver thread, to see if it would look more like window reflections - and it does, especially at a slant. (But the metallic is kinda hard to see in the photos.)

So, HURRAH!, a canvas finished and ready to frame, a project crossed of the list ..... and now on to the next project!!