Making texture in hand embroidery

My latest obsession is texture, in particular texture in trees, on the bark, the visual texture of groups of tree tops, the way the closer leaves can be seen in detail and the further ones merge into blobs of flat greens of various shades.  Texture on tree bark is a whole subject in itself, and I've been taking far too many photos of tree bark texture in the last few days; I'll have to do some heavy editing if I want to still have space on my hard drive.  I'm definitely looking at doing some hand embroidered texture around a tree theme, so I looked out my Hand Embroidery Unit Folder from 2011 and found this tree trunk texture piece that I worked in various threads and yarns, mostly couched.  It is one of my favourite pieces from that Unit.  It gives me a good start on thinking what I want to do with this theme.
 

Texture tree, threads and yarns, couching

©Christine Linton

While I was looking around for other textured embroidered art, I found this blog post from Alex Hall which has the most fascinating textural interpretation of pebbles - when I clicked on the image for a close up look, I was delighted to find rows of chain stitch, one of my favourite stitches, as well as bullions and french knots - worth the time to study it.
http://underatopazsky.wordpress.com/2011/10/26/embroidered-pebbles-2/