Translate

Saturday 4 May 2019

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!



16 comments:

Pamela said...

You have a nice selection of flower stitcheries. My suggestions for future subjects are dragonflies, birds, and cats. Thank you for hosting this SAL.

gracie said...

Wow, many lovely blooms!

Barb said...

You have stitched so many beautiful flower designs! I can't pick a favorite!!

diamondc said...

Oh my so many lovely designs with flowers, thank-you for sharing.

Catherine

Rachel said...

You have stitched some lovely flower pieces; the cards in particular are really effective with the combination of backstitching and colouring in.
The round-robin must have been a worrying time, hoping it didn't get lost in the post! I vaguely recall seeing a couple being stitched years ago but this is the only one I'm aware of which has been successfully completed. Great work by all concerned there. :)

Vickie said...

I absolutely LOVE your flower of the month greeting cards you did!! wOw!

Linda said...

Lovely projects Jo. I look at my card quite often.

Linda

jocondine said...

Always great to have stitched flowers in the house. So many lovely charts in this post. xxx

Ariadne said...

I used to love taking part in Round Robins. Sometimes I wish I could again as it is motivational. I love your Flower Fairies Round Robin. AriadnefromGreece!

Leonore Winterer said...

Pretty flowers! I guess this is a topic almost every stitcher can get behind. I linked up and added last month in the post too since I missed that checkin!

Christine said...

Lovely flower pieces! I'm very wary of round robins, I've had a couple of bad experiences with them

Astrids dragon said...

Oh wow, I really love the Flower Fairies, they're beautiful!

Bethan said...

Did you design your Flower Fairies Round Robin? It's ever so lovely - I can see why it's one of your favourites x

Julie said...

Lots of pretty blooms in this post

Tiffstitch said...

Love these finishes! I just got my post up before the link expiration. :)

Katie said...

I'm going to skip posting this time around even though I see it's still open. Just too busy lately. Great post though. Love all the stitching you did. Gorgeous! I remember round robins. I had several go missing in the mail so quick doing them. Well I don't know if they went missing or the person stole them. Never received all I know.