better

 

The dress engineer has a very particular code of ethics on certain things. Specifically, he's very reluctant to offer false praise on my handiwork. So when he didn't have much to say about my first foray into wool embroidery, I figured I needed to do better. A bit of reading up in a basic embroidery book yielded the idea of using my previous work as the underlayer for a bit of padded satin stitch. It seems to have worked out ok. For one thing, the color density came improved a lot. Once I made the flowers heavier, I thought the chain stitch stems looked a bit spindly, so I tried backstitching through them. Those might still get changed if I can learn how to do something more interesting. Still, an improvement, no? Or in the dress engineer's unsolicited opinion, "hey, that looks sort of pretty now." High praise indeed.