Ascetica theme slider – set order of sticky posts

I am using the free Ascetica theme and I have marked several posts as “sticky” so as to have them appear in the slider. However, I have not been able to change or control the order of the posts. I tried to change the post dates so that the most recent posts would appear first in the slider, but changing the date has no effect on the order, nor can I figure out how the order is determined.

The website is in maintenance mode and so I am not including a link. However, the questions is simply, how is the order of sticky posts appearing in the slider determined, and how can one change it? (I do have featured images properly set for each sticky post.)

Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks.