Bramble from original idea to yay! moment

Right, hello, this is my first blog so please be kind. For those of you that have seen my Folksy site you will know that I hand embroider wild flowers into pendants. I stumbled on this idea back in April 2012. I have always enjoyed embroidery although I have never been trained. I have learnt a great deal along the way, however, trained embroidery artists may shudder at some of my techniques.
I first started with the idea of doing larger embroideries and turning them into cushions, I began with the design for a bramble, four months later I finished the above piece. I loved it but as a business idea it just wasn't going to work, I would have to charge hundreds to make any kind of money; and then to spend all that time on a piece only to stitch it into a cushion and have someone sit on it made me cringe. No, I consider my work art and it should be shown off as such.
And so I started getting smaller and smaller until I had the idea that a piece could be worn on a chain and shown off, a pendant that could say something about the person wearing it. So the large bramble design was adapted and sketched to this:

 

The sketch showed the bramble through it's different phases. At this stage I was still working with cotton thread on silk material, and this was the result:

 

 

 

I was pleased with this pendant but after I had emailed the embroidery artist Helen M Stevens to ask for her advice she suggested I work with silk thread. So, I bought a starter set of fine silk floss from Pipers and was over the moon with the result:

 

 

 

The detail was so much finer and, while slippery, the silk floss was so nice to work with. This piece attracted a lot of interest and was sold recently. Last week I started sewing a new one but adapted the colours slightly and worked on the curve of the stem. I finished it today, stood back and admired...

 

 

 

Yeah baby!