Floral Designs: Help with Stitches (Flower Centers)

To recap, I'm discussing two smaller flower canvases and their elements and giving you options for various flower parts you'll see again and again in floral canvases.  Our choices are "Red Floral Heart" from Ann Wheat Pace and "Magnolia" from JudyAnn.   Today I'm talking about the centers of flowers.  JudyAnn's magnolia blossom has a center that's seen from the side.  It is darker at the base.  The little flowers on the red heart are more stylized and all one shade of yellow.

When it comes to flower centers, figure out first if there is shading and just how much room you have to work with.  If the space is small and especially if there is a lot of shading, tent stitches are a great choice.  I'd also consider tent stitches for the magnolia just because the center is less important than the flower petals.  The red heart has a lot of flowers but the centers are tiny, probably only 4-6 stitches each.  Tent stitch is also a good choice here.  

But let's say you want to add a bit of sparkle and drama to your centers, which would be fun on the red heart canvas.  Beads or metallics are the answer.  You can use a metallic thread in a tent stitch no matter how small your flower center is.  Beads are more tricky.  Size eleven beads will cover more ground.  I'm guessing but I think you could only add 3 size eleven beads to the red heart's centers. If you have size fourteen or fifteen beads, you could possibly add 4-5 beads in the very heart of your flower.  Let me be clear--I'm talking about attaching the beads with tent stitches and going through the center of each bead twice to keep them from wiggling.  Beads are very wiggly things!

Not everyone likes beads, either.  Remember, you can always substitute a tiny cross stitch for a bead. That gives texture although it's not as raised a look as a bead gives.  Tiny cross stitches would work nicely for the floral centers in both of our designs and you can do shading with cross stitches, too.  

You also might consider French knots (or Colonial knots, which are made differently but look very similar).  This gives a raised texture to your flower centers.  I think that would look wrong for the magnolia since it is a side view and might fight visually with the flower petals, but would work very nicely for the more stylized little pink flowers on the red heart.  You can shade with French knots, too.  Just have a photo of the unstitched canvas handy so you can see where to change colors as French knots tend to spread out and make it hard to see the subtly of the painted design.

So for flower centers we have tent stitches (again), beads, metallic threads, cross stitches, and either French knots or Colonial knots, depending on which you find easier to create.