I’ve just finished my embroidery of some of the David Austin roses in my garden…I have quite a few!

David Austin started breeding roses back in 1961 and he managed to breed roses which both looked beautiful and had a strong scent, but also repeat flowered, there wasn’t just a flush in June. I still have roses flowering in my garden now in mid October.

I’m making an embroidered book about our garden so I decided to embroider a page about the various different roses we have. I love all the different names of the roses, A Lark Ascending, This Scepter’d Isle, Gentle Hermione… I decided to do like a wheel of rose names with an embroidered rose towards the middle.

Initially I was just planning to write the names on the fabric with a sepia coloured pen. Unfortunately the pen I tried first, despite a test run, was clearly too heavy, however I’d already spent considerable time stitching the wheel shape so I wasn’t going to start again…

I decided to embroider all the words with back-stitch. You can see on the working progress photo below how Desdemona (at 3 o’clock) is heavier than the others

I stitched the roses first using bullion knots and sometimes a French knot or three in the middle, depending on how open the rose is.

I decided to stitch the names in the same colour as the leaves. I just picked some random shades of green for the foliage, I decided not to try and match it to the real thing as it was just going to get too complicated. It also worked well as I stitched the leaves and then the name, rather than settling down to stitch all the names in the same colour at the end.

Desdemona still shows up heavier but I don’t think it’s quite so obvious and I do like the idea that my hand writing is stitched into the book. It would have looked slightly better I think if I had written the names on the left side the other way round so they weren’t upside down but that would have been quite tricky, working out how long a name will be so that you start it in the right place to get them all finishing neatly in the middle…you get the drift!

A good press removed all the Frixion pen marks and I’m really pleased with the piece.