A Chinese friend of mine gave me this lovely purse from China to show y’all. Green and gold go well together.

It’s so pretty! It’s mostly a monochromatic design in four shades of green. Plus a few gold accents. Here’s another view of the design:

If you look at the close-up of the flowers below, you can see what a wonderful job they did shading the petals with long-and-short stitch. On some of them you can barely see the separate shades. And the gold centers help define these as individual flowers instead of just a large mass of petals.

The leaves, however, are blocks of solid color. They are shaded as blocks along the branch – darker at the center and lighter at the tips. I like the way they kept the shading scheme from the flowers but switched to block shading as a variation on the theme.