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.

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