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.

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I’m still very enthusiastic about completing Garden Party design by talented Helen Eriksson and here is one more plant finished — a wisteria. It’s the second flower out of nine, the first one is forget-me-not that I’ve shared earlier. The whole panel is worked in silk ribbon embroidery technique, and what I love about it most is that finishing each flower takes no time at all and all of them look very realistic indeed (at least on photos in a magazine with stitching instructions). I wasn’t sure when I just started stitching the wisteria that my embroidered version would look real-like, but as soon as finished it, I totally fell in love with it and there’s no doubt in me that it’s highly recognisable.

Wisteria Branch – Silk Ribbon Embroidery

At first I thought that suggested silk ribbon would be too pale for the design, but surprisingly its subtle variations worked well here, so I didn’t consider any other options at all. I used the darkest ribbon sections for upper parts of the bunches and the rest for lower parts as were recommended in the magazine.

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Most of us make New Year resolutions, and I’m not an exception. Every year I promise myself that I won’t start any new stitching project until I finish numerous ones I started before. Frankly there’s quite a few unfinished pieces in my so called ‘Project Box’. Every year I break my own promise and start a new piece that later on ends up in the ‘Project Box’! It definitely isn’t working this way and so this year I’ve made a resolution not to start anything big and focus on the contents of the box. I’m making progress actually. For example, I finished one goldwork embroidery that had spent two years in the box waiting, and there’s a couple of embroideries I’m currently working on. This branch of forget-me-not flowers is one of those pieces.

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I stitched this piece just before Easter, but couldn’t find time for sharing it.  We moved house, at the end of March, then it was Easter break, then it was never-ending struggle with boxes all over the place, and finally yesterday I finished unpacking my studio stuff and put all the things on their places, so I can comfortably do my job again. The rest of the house is still a real mess though, but at least one room here — my studio — looks nice and tidy. To celebrate the fact I’ve arranged some photo shooting today whilst it’s still spring here and my seasonal embroidery hasn’t got completely outdated. If you follow me on Instagram, you might have seen it already there.  I managed to post a photo of the unfinished embroidery just before moving.

This is a postcard I made. I love simple ways of finishing embroidery pieces, and I’ve got an idea of making a collection of silk ribbon embroidery postcards. They would look lovely pinned to a wall in my studio, and it does take little time to complete such a small embroidery. In fact it took me about two evenings to finish it including time I spent making the design and choosing materials!

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