Agapanthus, Beetle Daisey, Delphinium, Hollyhock
The flowers of the red Hollyhocks are detached buttonhole using a strand of Caron Wildflower cotton, color 219 Cardinal. Eyes of the flowers are a sunflower yellow tube type length of chained thread called French Ribbon (between 2mm and 4mm in width). I snipped the French Ribbon (from www.dicraft.co.za) in to very short lengths and couched them into the flowers centers.
At the bottom of the Hollyhocks I couched down into cabbage looking rosetta’s a interesting thread from my stash (I have long lost the id label on this thead). This thread is a braid made up of four cotton strands of variegated green shades. Each of these four threads that make up the braid are a lot thicker than a strand of DMC stranded floss.
The blue shade for the Agapanthus is two strands of Chameleon stranded cotton No 5 Arctic Blue from dicraft.co.za. Stitch is elongated fly stitch. For the right most Agapanthus flower I used one strand of the Arctic Blue and a strand of purple-blue cotton thread left over from my Christmas at the Beach worked piece. There is a little buggy climbing up the stalk of one of the left Agapanthus stems. Buggy is worked in stranded cotton also from the Christmas at the Beach thread stash.
The Delphinium don’t look much like a Delphinium. I purchased Ann Cox’s A-Z of Silk Ribbon Flowers book last year and have been wanting to try and create Delphinum flowers as she did in her book. That is Delphinium flowers with spurs at the back each of the flowers. I tried doing them here but didn’t have enough space for my fingers to work so I went to tacking down 7mm and 4mm gathered ribbons to form tall stalks of loosey-goosey looking blue flowers.
The orange Beetle Daisies at the bottom of these tall stalks is worked in 4mm silk ribbon with five beads in the center of each of these three little flowers.