Arlene's Stumpwork CQI RR

Here's Arlene's block after Karin and I have completed our work on it.  My contributions are the calla lilies, the dragonfly and the cast on stitch flower seam in pink/maroon.  The calla lilies are worked on muslin in a hoop and sewn on later.  For the needlelace leaves I worked on a pad made up of several layers of heavy cotton covered with a layer of "press and seal" saranwrap.  Under the saranwrap was my pattern.  After the leaf outline and centre lines have been couched down, the leaf is worked on top of the plastic.   When the couching stitches are removed, the leaf lifts off. 
The dragonfly wings were also made the same way.  But I had loads of trouble keeping the blanket stitch around the wire flat, it wanted to spiral, and it took me several tries to figure out why this happened and how to fix it as you can see from the pile of discarded wings.  In my time I've done a lot of macrame, and the blanket stitch around the wire is really a half knot.  In macrame when you do half knots, say for a planter hanger, the work spirals.  When you do a full knot, or a square knot as we called it, the work lies flat.  So that was how I did the dragonfly's wings, and they finally stayed flat.