Rose SRE tutorial

I've had a couple of people ask about how to do the rose bud in the previous SRE pieces, so I thought I'd post some photos of the process of both the full rose and the bud. Here's how to do the rose. I learned this from the book Learn To Do Ribbon Embroidery in Just One Day by De Selby. This stitch is called the stem stitch rose in the book. It begins with a French knot for the center of the rose, and as always in SRE, don't pull the ribbon too tight.

Bring the needle back up close to the F.knot to begin the first petal. Basically you're taking a stem stitch here, you're just going to do them around in a small circle, leaving a nice soft bit of ribbon on top for the petals. A twist in the ribbon here or there is actually beneficial for this flower. The book says to come up on the inside of the stitch, closest to the flower's center, but I've been doing it on the outside of the stitch, and it works fine, too. Maybe one way or the other will work better for you, so try both.

First petal in place, now on to the second....

....and keep going around the circle.....

....until the rose is as big as you'd like it to be. As you can see, this rose is really nice when done in a variegated ribbon (as here), or with two colors of ribbon, as in the orange roses on the green moire a few posts back.

I will try to post the bud photos tomorrow!