The two chrysanthemums are complete, one in twisted silk and one in flat silk! I think there will be knots of some kind inside the yellow one and gold veins on the leaves.
For the cherry blossoms I finished the underlying silk layer. Two are worked in flat silk and three in soft-twist thread (which I twisted myself). For comparison below you can also see the maple leaves in (hard) twist thread and flat silk.
What’s left? Gold! All the cherry flowers will have stylized gold stamens to make it even more sparkly. It shines already, although it’s very difficult to capture the effect in a photo. I tried with two different kinds of lighting -maybe I will try again tomorrow! I love looking at the different textures plus the light on the silk. This is really bringing textural design to my attention. I wonder what happens if you twist non-silk threads? I should try it. 
embroidery for ducks 
This is stunning!!!!! Can’t wait to see the added gold!!!!!
Me neither!
The thing with silk is that you are twisting long filaments, whereas with cotton or wool there are short fibres which need to be combed until they have the same alignment and then drafted so that the fibres have enough overlap not to fall apart, but the cross section is what you want for the final thread. It’s a much more difficult job than twisting silk, but there are a lot of people who can talk about it, and there are probably videos to help, now!
Very interesting!
Quelle magnifique broderie felicitation Marie-Claire
🙂
I’m really enjoying talking to my local friend Chris about her experiences with JE, and looking at your progress – It’s looking lovely.
Do tell! What’s she working on?