How does your garden grow with stitch?

"How does your garden grow with stitch?" is an update on a post I published way back in 2015, when I stitched my first "impressionist garden" for a course I was studying at the Embroiderers' Guild.

Gardens are my constant inspiration for my artwork, and I create gardens in cloth and stitch repetitively, using many different techniques. I am particularly fond of this heavily stitched embroidered "impressionist" garden.

In 2016, I stitched two small gardens in this style for an exhibition and they included photos of my husband's grandmother and her brother and sister as children. Although the collector who bought these two works did not know our family, the children reminded him of his own family from England of about the same era. These two 'gardens' have become my "stitch" reference and images which best showcase the technique although I don't have the originals any more.

Since then, quite a few other gardens have grown, often to celebrate significant birthdays of family and friends ... pictured, one square in 2017, stitched as a contribution to a family quilt for my husband, and the other in 2018, for a friend's 80th birthday.

What prompted a recent return to these stitched gardens? Over the last few years, I have stitched a series called "Garden Threads" - a slow stitching abstract exploration of colour, using only basic stitches - running stitch and random cross stitch. This year, I started embroidery some "healing" flowers and really enjoyed the process of representing flowers in stitch again .

And like that, a new series was started this year, 2025 .... and just this last weekend, I shared the process with six lovely stitchers, who I think enjoyed the experience of stitching a garden too.

( Look for a future post about the workshop fun )

Link to the previous post about stitched gardens , including the colouring of the backgrounds with crayons .... How does your garden grow with crayons?

https://empresswu.blogspot.com/2015/04/how-does-your-garden-grow-with-crayons.html.

Countdown to Christmas 20 - Fruitcake song!

There are many songs about fruit cakes - not all of them referring to the Christmas cake we know and love.It is really surprising to learn via Google that there are 89 listed songs with references to Christmas cake or fruit cake - not all of them complimentary. Probably one of the most famous folk songs about Christmas cake is Miss Fogarty's Christmas Cake (a favourite sung by The Irish Rovers). This first recorded comical Christmas song was written by C Frank Horn in 1883 in Pennsylania, as a variation of an Irish folk song, 'Miss Mulligan's Christmas Cake' . The chorus might give you the hint that Miss Fogarty's cake was not for the faint hearted or those who suffered from a weak stomach. Chorus : There were plums and prunes and cherries, There were citrons and raisins and cinnamon, too There was nutmeg, cloves and berries And a crust that was nailed on with glue There were caraway seeds in abundance Such that...

Fish and Sticks : Art Dolls

This week I've been working on fish and sticks .... The sticks are the message stick art dolls which were very popular, attracting some attention and a few orders at the Wise Women exhibition. Each of the message stick dolls are from the Wise Women series, each with her own personality and message of wisdom, handwritten on a handmade timber tag. I gather the sticks during my walks around my neighbourhood and the tags are made from special bits of timber, some collected by me or my husband or from off cuts gifted to us from another doll making friend whose husband makes bagpipes. These dolls start off very simply with a wrap around a stick, in the general shape of a body. 'Naked" message stick dolls - strips of wadding wrapped around found sticks. Then I usually wrap other layers of fabric, wool, and/or fibres, over which I do some simple embroidery. I sculpt or mould small face masks for these dolls. I really like using "sari ribbon" as w...

Empress Wu Designs with Wilma

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