Adelaide Rosella

The Adelaide Rosella is a local hybrid of the Yellow and Crimson Rosella.  Recently I started to spend more time on developing my skills in machine embroidery.  This is because arthritis prevents me from hand embroidery now.  So I decided to extend myself into this area, which I had previously touched on but nothing further.  I bought a book by Carol Shinn called Freestyle Machine Embroidery, and started working through the exercises.  Following the exercise on blending of colours, (feed dogs down) I completed my Adelaide Rosella by blending on the belly area, during which I found it was better to use the lighter colour to make the last layer or it didn’t show up enough.  It is important to have enough shades in the colour chosen that are close enough to grade smoothly, and I found that harder than I expected – my orange-yellows blended better than did my orange-reds, you can see that in the photo.  Once more a hoop upside down was important to avoid too much distortion (that will be a future project in itself, using distortion for effect) and frequent steam pressing on the wrong side was important also to pull out the inevitable buckling that does occur.  In her book Carol Shinn gives detailed instructions for colour blending – a terrific resource.