Tuesday 26 May 2009

Travelling Book - Crocus

As winter draws to a close, I can hardly wait for the spring bulbs to bring colour back to the gtarden. While I eagerly anticipate the snowdrops, daffodiles and tulips, there is one delight that I ofter forget. Even before the snowdrops have completed the opening act, in the first breath of warm sunshine, small hummocks of species crocus burst open and turn their saffron centres to face the sun.



For this page, I adapted the technique learnt at the Kathleen Laurel Sage workshop. I used tiny pieces of organza, sandwiched between two pieces of organza. The pieces where arranged to create the shading. I stitched over the entire design with a decorative stitch on my sewing machine to secure the pieces. I then outlined my design with free machine embroidery using a metalic thread and cut away the void areas.


The sepals are needle woven picots made from hand twisted silk and the orange centres are a single turkey stitch using several strands of flat silk.



I had great fun creating these pages but they were suprisingly time consuming.

Happy stitching

4 comments:

MargB said...

A gorgeous crocus and so beautifully reproduced - I can't decide which I admire most - the incredible machine stitching or the beautifully worked centres - the picots and the turkey stitch just work so well

Denise Felton said...

So gorgeous. LOVE the techniques. I just put a link to this post on my blog. I hope it brings you a few extra clicks.

Denise
http://needlework.craftgossip.com

Paula Hewitt said...

wonderful. great use of the embroidery stitches in the centre. the petals are made with an interesting technnique - i will ahve to remmebr that for future

deepa said...

Aaahh..this is a beauty..