Flower embroidery

Inspired by my "flowering feather stitches" that you could read about yesterday, I stitches a few more lucite flowers last night. This time I just wanted to try a different way of embroidering with centre-drilled flowers and beads. Normally you fasten flowers like this by "locking" it with a seed beads. Thinking about the long stamen you can find on e.g. the delicated little veronicas (speedwell), I thought it might not always be a bad to have thread showing. So I simple tacked it down with four straight stitches between the petals. For the flower at the top, I also added a small french knot to the centre.

I also added leaves to some of the flowers. A stalk of doubled feather stitch for the middle fllower and doubled fly stitches for the flower in the bottom left corner. My favourite is in the bottom right corner. There I added small lazy daisies between each petal.

Going through my flower bead box for additonal flowers to stitch, my eyes fell on my black metal bead caps that I bought to use as flowers rather than caps. Of cause I had to embroider with one of those!

Here I first tacked down the cap using straight stitches between each petal and then I anchored it further by stitching around each petal and then over two petals at the time (resulting in the pentagram/star shape you might see in the middle). To make the centre less hollow, I ended by making a small stitch over the threads in the middle.

The big question now is what to do next, using this technique and : an embroidered piece of jewellery (pendant, brooch, bracelet) or "just" embroideries. It'd be fun doing an embroidery (as in wall art or other kind of work that isn't jewellery/wearable art) with bead cap flowers. A different way of using findings and jewellery components. Maybe a whole piece, embroidering with various findings such as chains, bead caps, tags etc? I just thought of that. Now there's an idea!

So either that or do jewellery, which is what I am -- a jewellery maker (and beader). Perhaps a cute bracelet with lucite flowers and lazy daisy leaves.