I’m quite a beginner in gardening and have never grown foxgloves. All I know about them is that they are incredibly tall and bumblebees love them. So when I started stitching my next flower from ‘Garden Party’ design I thought it wouldn’t be my favourite one. I’m also usually sceptical about scaling down large plants for miniature silk ribbon embroidery, as, let’s be honest, it is very hard to make tiny piece that still got enough detail to look life-like. After all, two already finished flowers — forget-me-not and wisteria — are quite rich in detail, the foxglove should match them to feel in place. With these thoughts and somewhat skeptical attitude I made the first bright pink foxglove (or it might be a hollyhock) and immediately fell in love with it as soon as it was finished. There are so much details in this small embroidery. You don’t notice them when you see the whole picture, but you do recognise them whilst stitching. And the flowers are so bright and crisp in colour — everything that I love.
It’s common to stitch foxglove flowers with ribbon stitches, that’s why I reckon it might be a mistake in a magazine where I got the pattern from and it’s a hollyhock as a matter of fact. Anyway, I like Helen Ericsson’s choice to go for the gathered flowers. They might look not as an identical copy of real foxgloves, but the stylisation is absolutely charming, and the flowers are strikingly recognisable. They remind me of a cottage garden.