Take It Further, February...Rolled Ribbon Roses

I took this picture at Freda Butler's house last week-end. It is a detail of a lovely vintage embroidered bag she had up on her wall. I thought those roses might look good on my Take It Further block for February, if I could figure out how to make them.

Well, I did NOT figure out how they were done and came up with these instead. I won't give a tutorial because I was literally all thumbs making these! But I do like how they came out.

For this month's challenge I also decided to try out some of Pam Kellogg's waste canvas seam treatments from her new book. Here are some leaves in progress. I like doing this kind of work so much....the counting and grid give a solid structure to work within. Sometimes that is just very satisfying.

Here they are in progress, on 10 count canvas....That is yummy Sasse Lynn thread sent to me from Susan Nixon.

And here they are completed. You might notice they look a little darker in this picture. That is because once they were done and the canvas was pulled off, I thought the leaves were just too light. So I very carefully painted the threads with some Tsukineko ink, which worked great.

Here is another of Pam's designs. This one took awhile, but it was worth it.

This was done on 14 count canvas.

And here is the block as a whole thus far.
As I've been stitching on it, I have been musing that it is not about innocence lost so much...but more about just being young, being 17...remembering that special time in my life before the buds had quite opened.....