This is the American Beauty Rose: Brazilian dimensional embroidery stitched with 100% rayon Z-twist floss from EdMar Co. It's my original Millefiori design #965. I'm sharing it today because it's a variation of the traditional bullion rose that has been around forever -- the same Bossa Nova Rose that I stitched the other day. (By the way, that flower might have looked nicer on its bed of leaves if I'd added another round of bullions and made it a bit larger!) Here is a close-up photo of my American Beauty Rose: You can see that, where the traditional bullion rose's bullion stitches start OUTSIDE the previous bullions, for this rose, I started each bullion INSIDE the previous one and put a bit more space between. Well, of course, it needed "background". So, for each petal (the flat "petals" on the fabric), I worked a batch of long-and-short buttonhole stitches over bullion padding at the edges. This is the Raised Buttonhole Stitch I've written about previously where the loops of the buttonhole stitches are raised slightly to rest on top of the underlying bullion. Here's a diagram: And here's a picture, sort of . . . If you hold the embroidery at eye level, you'll see the petals are slightly above the fabric. I use this technique quite often, so if you have any of my books (me = Rosalie Wakefield), shown here on my website, you'll be able to read about this handy-dandy dimensional technique in more detail. By the way, that pretty little purple flower is something I named a "Punctuation Plant" after a combination bullion/cast-on stitch called "The Comma." Here's another picture: So, just remember, all of these original B.E. flowers, such as the bullion or Bossa Nova rose, can be played with, moved around, experimented with, until you see what you can discover that's a bit different. It's called playing with your floss, and in Brazilian dimensional embroidery it's known as having fun -- and that's exactly what we do! Rosalie