I'm making slow progress on the seal..... had to do a lot of thread changes to get the look I wanted.
I hand stitched a circle around the leaves.
I love the 3D look on a quilt so I used 2 spools of thread. In the photo above you can see I have threaded them through the tensions at the same time. This is to prevent fraying.
Here you see the two thread through the eye of the needle. You will probably need to use a needle threader if you want to try this method.
Above, hopefully, you can see the slightly raised stitching on the veins.
And finally, I handed stitched the second circle. I'm now ready to do some sort of round robin to enlarge the quilt block.