Trying out some stitching to overlay the couching

Just spent ages stitching in all the ends of threads above Dolly. Had to be done and had to be left until this stage. After that I started testing out different stitches I could use to overlay a pattern on the couching. On my little practice linen swatch I did some sections of couching and tried out some ideas. The DNA stitch I have developed would have worked but I'm much more enamoured with the Pictish spirals as they double up as both a wool pattern for the fleece and have the symbolic associations with reproduction which is very appropriate for this panel.

I've taken the central pattern from the Aberlemno stone and it is pretty intricate so I've traced it onto tissue paper and I'm following curves by stitching through the tissue paper then removing the paper and stitching over those guide stitches. I had thought to do that in a thread which I would later remove but now I find that the backstitch is neat and I can use it in a different way. To take the curves well I tried reverse chain stitch but it is blocking out too much of the white wool behind so I tried stem stitch but it was sinking into the couching. Whipped backstitch works beautifully though and floats nicely above the couching giving a clear pattern while also letting the white ground through. So that's the stitch selected and I now have to finish couching Dolly before I can add those wool spirals. I'm doing the perpendicular bars and then couching them with couching in brick stitch because when I tested this out on the practice linen having the couching stitches in a column made the strand of wool underneath twist and unravel a bit (I'm doing the couching through the thread underneath so that they don't separate and show the linen). Doing the little test patches on the spare linen is a bit of a chore but it really does save a lot of time in the long run. Ahem, filling in big descriptions on blip foto on the other hand is eating into my embroidery time so byeee!