Stitching Spring Flowers (part two)

Hello......I'm back with a stitchy update for my springtime thread garden.

So my first post ended with the first half of garden completed, you can read more about it here

So starting from the other side of the fabric, my greatest worry was how could I get the balance right and the flowers in the right place so they matched the other side, in the end I decided to work from the outside in toward the centre, as I've said I'm new to embroidery and I'm not sure if that's what you are supposed to do, but it's what I did.........

This time I had some fun with the ribbon embroidery, as at least I had a bit of a clue as to what I was doing.

I also wanted there to be some differences between the two sides, but also balance as you would have in the real garden. So I added the same elements lavender and snowdrops but with a slight variation.

I continued with my doodle stitching until the design met in the middle and I couldn't resist adding a bit of sparkle along the way.  I selected the colours randomly and stitched away, my only consideration when picking colours was are they Spring like, so I hope that the colours say Springtime, they do to me at least.

So the main part of the embroidery was done, my garden complete, now it was time to fill the sky with some added extras, at this stage I was a little sad that I had not thought to paint  the sky before I started stitching but hey ho maybe next time.

First up I made this little cutie, it's hard to believe but I crocheted this butterfly out of embroidery floss, you can read more about how to make them here

I then started playing around with ideas to fill the sky as there seemed a lot of empty space at the top of the fabric, I thought about maybe adding some Springtime bunting but in the end ....

I opted for fluffy felt clouds with pretty beaded raindrops.

I cut out the clouds free hand then stitched them into place with some silver sparkly floss, adding a little bit of stuffing to the clouds to make them extra fluffy, before sewing on some bicone beaded raindrops

Then it was time to add some sunshine to go with those showers, I wanted my sun to be peeping out from behind a cloud and if I could have found the yellow felt I would have just added a felt sun, alas that was not to be,

so instead I spent quite some time stitching one in place, by sewing rings of satin stitch, I did this all free hand doodle style so it turned out my sun was not quite round.

However after I'd added some beaded golden sun rays it didn't look so very bad.

So we're nearly at the Ta-Dah moment......

Happy Crafting

Clare xx