Empress Wu Designs with Wilma

How does your garden grow with crayons? With a little bit of imagination and lots of stitches!  Why does your garden grow with crayons? Because that was the challenge of the monthly assignment of my creative embroidery course.  It was a surprise to open my package and discover a packet of twelve coloured crayons, some white cotton fabric and lots of coloured stranded embroidery cotton. The task was to create a stitched garden, after colouring the fabric with crayons. I have always loved the impressionist Monet gardens, so I approached this task happily.... until I realised how long it takes to fill a space with stitches! Crayon applied to cotton fabric with texture ( rubber stamp under the fabric) - Empress Wu Designs 2015  Stitching the "distant" spaces first - French knots, Lazy Daisy stitch, fly stitch, straight stitch. Empress Wu  Designs 2015  Detail  1 - Crayon Garden - Empress Wu Designs 2015 (French knots, fly stitch, straight ...

Border pattern   ( February 2015 - Wilma Simmons)  Was this on my bucket list ?  No,  not really, but after completing Stages 1 & 2 of the Creative Embroidery Correspondence Course with the Embroiderers' Guild about twenty+ years ago, this year I decided to enrol in Stage 3 - finally.  As I want to record what I do, I am sharing each month's exercises with you right here. If you are unfamiliar with these courses, what you get each month is an envelope with instructions, handwritten comments by your assessor and some threads and fabric and then the completed work is returned to the Guild each month for assessment. February's threads and fabric  For February's lesson, the theme was inspired by border patterns, emphasising the way stitches turn into patterns when used close together to fill shapes and spaces. Besides the embroidery, there were drawings to do - three border patterns and three square patterns like tiles. I love doing this part, bu...