One of my most successful purchases from the Harrogate Flower Show has been Brunnera Jack Frost, I bought it quite a number of years ago and it still looks good, It’s a hard working perennial which has sprays of tiny blue flowers in spring and cream and sage green variegated foliage the rest of the time, well apart from deepest winter! It’s a bit like a perennial forget-me-not, but taller and sprightlier…

…and with a more interesting leaf. It now has several babies growing around the garden!

When I was stitching one of the wreath patterns from a mystery bundle from Sookie Soo on instagram I stitched lots of French knots in a variegated blue and it crossed my mind that if you were to make a wreath from Jack Frost, it could look like this…

OK so the leaves aren’t variegated but it is only about 2″ across!

This is one of the embroideries for my garden book, my plan is to do crazy patchwork pages with these little stitchings, interspersing them with the full page embroideries. I decided it was time to start putting some of these pages together,

I rummaged in my fabric stash and found some blues and greens which went nicely with the stitching. I ‘crazy-patch-worked’ them together and started stitching. I added trims, embroidered round them and over them…

…I felt the flowery fabric at the top, whilst very pretty, seemed to dominate the piece. I decided to add some lace over the top. I carefully cut a segment of a doily I bought for 50p in a vintage shop that’s opened in Otley. I then had the idea of running a gimp thread through the lace which I can then extend into the adjoining areas…

This is what I like about crazy patchwork, you can just run with an idea and go with the flow. So I’m planning on couching into the green area and developing it a little more, and the blue corner still needs sorting, but it’s getting there. I think one of the issues with this kind of stitching is knowing when to stop!

Once this one is finished I’ve several more little embroideries to incorporate into my garden book so I think I’ll be busy for a while.