It’s Happy Dance time! I’ve finally finished the embroidery of the summerhouse garden and I’m well chuffed with it. It’s taken me about six months but apart from the fact that there is a lot of stitching (and thinking time!) I do have a few other projects on at any one time to distract me.

Three weeks ago I was still stitching the pond area…

…I was stitching a pretty geranium which has spread and trailed itself nicely under the roses. I used a variegated DMC thread which is pink and green, using the green bits for lazy daisy leaves and the pink bits for the flowers. Trailing it into the pond just helped break up the pond edges a bit.

The round bush on the right is an elderly rhododendron, it looked fairly mature when we moved here nearly 25 years ago! I used lazy daisy stitch for the upright flowers and the droopy leaves. I stitched a couple of hellebores, one with white french knot flowers which is the slightly prickly one, and one with pinky purple straight stitched petals next to it.

There’s a little round shrub at the front which I just stitched with French knots, the tall frothy plant next to the summerhouse is called a thalictrum I think, it nicely takes up quite a bit of space in my stitched garden! There’s a beautiful camelia in the corner so that has lazy daisy leaves and chunky French knot flowers. The brighter blue flowers at the front are meant to be pulmoniaria

I felt the pond looked a little bare so I added Hubert, my chicken-wire heron which I made quite a few years ago.

Sometimes when I get near to the end of a piece like this and I start to look at it as a whole, I realise there’s some bare patches, they don’t necessarily need filling, just something. On the other side the ground under the white rose looked a little empty so I just used a light variegated pinky brown thread and made a few seed stitches. I wanted to show the path in some way so I just used a variegated greeny-grey thread and some intermittent straight stitches , a solid line would have been to harsh. I thought I’d finished but every time I looked at it my eye was drawn to the paving under the summerhouse. It’s actually just large square flagstones but with the distortion of the angles and perspective in this design that wasn’t going to work so I just did a few random straight stitches that filled the space…artistic license!

I think I’ve finished, though the corner behind the summerhouse is now drawing my eye, so I might add a little to that!

I’m well chuffed with these garden pages, they’re about 5.5″ by 7″, I’m planning to give them about 1/2″ or 1″ border when I make the pages into a book. This is the second ‘big’ page I’ve done, here’s the two together…

I’ve just one more of these ‘big’ garden pages to do, the Amber and Amethyst garden, so lots of purples and oranges. I’m hoping it won’t take quite so long, for a start the gravelled area is much bigger so the borders are smaller.

Stitching my garden has been a long project in the making, so I’m starting to get itchy feet to start putting it together. I started in January 22, I enrolled on a zoom course with Nicki Franklyn from the Stitchery, it was called ‘Stitch-a-garden’. I loved the course, Nicki is a great teacher, very inspiring and easy to listen too. I decided I had enough pictures so I would put them into a book…18 months later I’m still stitching my garden!

This stitch-a-long is organised by Avis from Stitching by the Sea, please follow the links to see what everyone else has been stitching.

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