Foxgloves, Rain Daisies, wild Dagga, Rock Roses and a Dragonfly

The foxgloves stems (twisted long stitch) and leaves (detached chain stitch) are worked in 7mm YLI silk ribbon color 020. Using a double strand of Gentle Arts Sampler Threads – Shutter Green I stitched French Knots along the stems. For the flowers of the left foxglove stem I used YLI 4mm silk ribbon colors 181 and 84. For the flowers along the right foxglove stem I used 4mm River Silk colors 163 and 17.

I created the Dragonfly body by doubling over a short length of cloth covered wire then wrapping it with YLI 4mm silk ribbon color 84 (dark purple).

I finger-shaped the cloth covered wire into the shape for the four tiny wings. I then sandwich glued the shaped wire between two pieces of a wide dark ruby color organza thread. After the glue dried I carefully snipped away the organza just outside the shaped wire and then used a double strand of the Gentle Art cotton (color Garden Gate) wrapping it around the body of the insect while catching the twisted wire ends of the four wings to be tightly snugged against the insect mid-body. I wanted to put a third set of wings above the four wings snug to the insect’s body. So I glued together another two squares of the dark ruby organza thread and when once well dried I just snipped out what I thought would make two (connected) little top wings. These little wings were glued onto the top of the mid-body of the insect. I used the Gentle Art Garden Gate color stranded cotton to make the little twisted antennas (by stab stitching dual threads up by the French Knots that I created for the insects eyes then twisting two threads, gluing them to make them stiff and shaping as they dry).

The Wild Dagga stem was worked in a loose silk ribbon thread from my stash (so I do not know the color number). For the wild Dagga flowers I used 4mm YLI color 239 created using the Pistil stitch.

For the petals of the Rain Daisies I decided to use two threads of EdMar, Iris weight, one white, one yellow. I threaded the two rayon threads into the same needle for creating the center bullion stitch of each of the Rain Daisy petals. I then used two threads of Chameleon Thread stranded cotton, color 23 — Daffodil to stitch Lazy Daisy around each bullion stitch. I used Turkey Stitch to fill in the center of the Rain Daisies using the Chameleon stranded cotton color 23.

The leaves (leaf stitch) of the mid-height low grouping of flowers was created using Di van NieKerk’s 2mm silk ribbon color 30 — Shrub. The stems of these flowers are a single strand of a med-green size 5 Perle thread. The soft peach color of these small flowers were worked in Edmar rayon.

I wanted the Rock Roses to look like little floppy cabbage roses so I did spider web roses using using Di van NieKerk’s 4mm silk ribbon color 41 — Mixed Berry.