I started over.

Attempting to embroider directly on a garment that was already fully constructed was more than slightly frustrating.  Even working with a hoop stand so that I had both hands free it was difficult to work my hands through the neck and bottom of the shirt with each stitch.  So I decided to abandon the work I had already done and start again on a separate piece of linen.  

Once I had the pattern printed out on the stabilizer and added it to the linen I put it in a hoop and started working.  Watching Rachel Maksy of course. Mrs. Dormouse loves her.  

This went quite a bit faster than the first time around.  I used lazy daisy stitches with two strands of thread to fill in the seeds in the center of the flower.  I’ll fill in the tiny lines with a single strand later.  This was however far, far more time consuming than sashiko.  So I’m suffering a bit through this but I want to do thread painting so suffer I must.

Currently I’m doing the outlines for the petals and tried doing a bit of the fill in with short/long stitch.  This was a bit awkward so I decided to skip filling in the rest of the petals until I practiced on a small sampler with the thread painting.  I switched to outlining the rest of the petals which is going well.