The People Chose Flowers

Regular followers will be aware that for over 3 years now I have run a themed SAL on the first Saturday of each month.  First we spent 26 months doing The Alphabet Club and then 12 months of the Zodiac.  Now I have decided to listen to the People and post about your choice of theme.  Each month I ask for suggestions on the blog and then make a poll in the IHSW Facebook Group from those suggestions.

May - Flowers

June - Mermaids
July - Finishing

Floral designs must be the number one most popular subject for stitching along with An Alphabet.  Flowers have appeared in samplers since the earliest day, often as stylised borders or motifs.  Now you can stitch everything from reproduction styles to realistic floral pictures via personified flower fairies.

My very first finish back in 1993 featured a stylised basket of flowers in a mini sampler from Anchor:

The next year I moved on to a series of four designs by Sue Cook based on the artwork of Alphonse Mucha.  This one is Flowers:

In 2012 I worked my way through the Flower of the Month series from World of Cross Stitching magazine and stitched all 12 as greeting cards sent out to various friends in the cross stitching world.  Here's a collage of them all:

I tried a different technique for the flowers.  I did the backstitch in one of the colours used and then coloured the highlights of the flowers using felt-tipped pens.  Very quick and effective!

This next design is one of my favourite Floral pictures, a Round Robin from the days when they were really popular and we often had two running at once!  This one is based on Joan Elliott's Flower Fairies.  I stitched the six flowers in the centre and sent out instructions about placement and stitching for each of the main fairies.  This comes out on display every Summer:

I don't really have a current project which is floral based although a number of the Just Nan smalls do feature flowers as well as Summer Typography:

Now it's over to you. All you have to do is make a post on the theme of Flowers, mention The People's Choice SAL (you can copy the picture I used at the top of this post and in my side bar) and my blog. Please link up using the URL of the actual blog post, not the home page of your blog. I look forward to seeing what you all post.

*

*

Finally, I need your suggestions for the next poll.  Any thing, no matter how obscure, weird or random will go into the poll.  Keep the theme suggestions to a single word or two - so you could have Cats, or Blue, or Holidays, or Warmth etc.  Really anything which could be illustrated in cross stitch.

Looking forward to reading them all!