Earlier this year I signed up for an on-line workshop with Nicki Franklyn from The Stitchery called Stitch a Garden. I’ve admired Nicki’s work for a while, it’s so pretty and delicate so it didn’t take long to persuade myself to enrol.

The idea is that you create an embroidery of either your own garden or a garden you love, or even an imaginary garden. Nicki is stitching Beatrix Potter’s garden at Hill Top in Cumbria. I’m stitching our garden, but rather than a picture, I’m making a textile book. My walls are covered in pictures and I think a textile book will make a rather nice record of the garden.

Earlier workshops were on things like planning the stitching, colouring fabric with paints, stitching trees and bushes. I haven’t got very far with mine, here’s some of my trees…

Whilst I have in my head how I’m planning to create this book I haven’t got very far in the actual stitching. Hopefully making this my SAL piece will encourage me on. I think it’s a bit like a blank page at the moment, once I actually start it will be a lot easier!

Ideas so far; rather than one map of the whole garden I’m planning to do three or four maps, one for each area, i’m also thinking of a simple embroidery of the roses in our garden and their names, little scenes such as the pots, the arbour, pond, summerhouse., maybe I’ll do an embroidery of the birds who visit our garden too.

I’m also planning to include quotes or poems about gardens, which is where my current piece comes in. I can’t remember if I’ve shown you this before, but it’s a design by Soukiesoo. She hand draws her designs on linen with a heat erasable pen, so once I’ve finished I can just iron it. Unfortunately this also means I can’t iron it for a photo – I so very nearly did this morning!

Her designs are lovely and I think they compliment Nicki’s very well. At the moment I’m just stitching the words with satin stitch…

It’s taking quite a while, although it’s not very big, it’s about 6″ by 7″. I started doing the satin stitch properly with a split stitch edge to stitch over, but I felt it was actually neater without, maybe because it’s a thin area.

Hopefully in three weeks time when I next show my progress I’ll have a few more letters stitched and maybe some designs painted too.

This Stitch-a-long is organized by Avis from Sewing beside the Sea, we post every three weeks with our progress on our chosen project, it does help to keep me motivated on a big project! Please follow the links to see everyone else’s work.

Avis, Claire, Gun, Constanze, Christina, Kathy, Margaret, Cindy, Heidi, Jackie, Sunny, Megan, Deborah, Sharon, Daisy, AJ, Cathie, Linda, Helen