I have finally made some progress with my garden SAL. This is a course by Nicki from the Stitchery, she’s been giving lots of ideas on how to represent trees, flowers and structures etc. I’m making mine into a book about our garden, we have put our house on the market so it’s going to have lots of memories stitched into it.

It’s taken me a while to get going with this piece, I think it’s one of those where you have to just jump in and start, three weeks ago I’d just made the patio on some painted calico…

With hindsight (always useful!) I would have been better to cut it out and iron it on to the final piece first, or at least once the main outline was done as although it’s bondawebbed on fine at the moment, I think it would have been better to secure it with some embroidery through all thicknesses.

This first page is a map of our patio just in front of the conservatory. I did find it very hard to start, however once I’d used running stitch round the border of the design and also used three rows of running stitch to mark the stone wall of the raised bed I did get a bit more confident. This is my page so far…

I’ve used a quilting cotton to stitch on and that is how it came, a sort of splodgy muted green and brown! I’ve no idea what idea I was thinking of when I bought it but I think it works pretty well for garden background. The applique trees and shrubs are all from the calico I painted earlier, I painted a new area for the purple acer and sambuscus.

The hardest thing so far which I’m still struggling with a bit is perspective. If I did it like a proper map then the arbour would have been just a flat rectangle, the bird bath would have been a circle…I’ve had to use a bit of artistic license! Here’s a close up…

The large purple shrub is the sambuscus, or elder, it has quite feathery leaves so I’ve just used a sort of planned seed stitch, the other purple one is the acer which also has feathery leaves so I haven’t quite worked out how I’m going to differentiate between the two. Maybe just using a redder shade will do the trick.

Initially with the roses (caller Generous Gardener) which grow over the arbour I was just planning to do the French knots, but it was too spotty, so I added some branches and I think it looks a lot better.

My pots are many shades of dark blue, green or terracotta. As I’ve just done circles so far I’m just stitching the rim in blue and I’ll then put some plant stitching in the pots. The blue circle edged in blanket stitch is the water feature. There’s a couple more pots to add to fill the right area, though in reality I have LOTS!

Either side of the patio are irises, I’m still trying to work out how to stitch them though I think I’ll just do straight stitch leaves pointing to the side like the bird bath with little blue flowers.

The other area I’m still trying to work out are the areas of the beds where it’s general planting all mingling together, rather than specimen plants. I’m thinking of painting the background green and then stitch a general melee of leaves and flowers. I’ve also an obelisk to include with clematis growing up it which should be reasonably simple to do.

Hopefully now I’ve started I should make reasonable progress, though I’ve another two maps to do! I’m really enjoying the process though.

This bloggers SAL is organised by Avis, we post our progress on our chosen project every three weeks, just enough to keep us motivated! Please follow the link to see what everyone else has been stitching.

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