Waiting for Cuthbert to Move ...

...so I could download my pictures.

He didn't, so I worked around him.

Here is a picture of a new flower I designed -- the Edelweiss, a pretty little alpine wildflower we all remember from "The Sound of Music".

I'm not sure if the designing or the stitching, or the creative presentation is the most fun. Probably all of the above. I stitched the design with the "Alps" on medium blue Trigger poplin and mounted it on foam core board (poked pins in the sides). Then I finished the sides with some pretty rick rack (nice to find a use for that stuff!) pinned to the foam board, too.

I wrote the flower name with my Micron Pigma Pen (the entire embroidery is also signed/initialed-dated). Then I glued it to that board using my favorite fast-drying clear glue, Fabri-Tac (from JoAnn Stores). The wood is a piece of pine board that someone wood-burned some daisies onto (I touched them up with my acrylic paints). I thought it was pretty, and it made a nice frame.  Yes, I found it at a garage sale. Oh - those flowers? 

Well ... I wandered through the house because I just KNEW I had some silk flowers somewhere. I did. They were in a bouquet, so I popped off a couple of blossoms, decided where they might look nice, dropped a splotch of glue down and plunked them into it.  I like the way it all turned out.

The picture that inspired me was sent by a friend.

I looked at it and tried to decide which stitches I would use (Yes, designing is just that easy!) and I researched it on the Internet. Those "petals" are actually bracts like a poinsettia and the "flower" is the center part. I discovered that the bracts are fuzzy and thought Cire would be a perfect fiber choice.
     I'll leave all of the stitching details to be a surprise! This will be the May Freebie "One-A-Month" design that the Brazilian Dimensional Embroidery International Guild, Inc. is giving to everyone in honor of the start of our next 20 years as a guild.
     Our first flower is already posted - I wrote about it the other day here. If you go to the BDEIG website, scroll to the bottom of the page for "Free Designs to Stitch". That's where you'll find all of the instructions.
 
I stitched the Edelweiss on white fabric using Cire #227 (palest sea green). Here's a picture.

Looking at it on my computer monitor, the fabric threads were showing and it looked kind of "harsh". So I popped the jpg into my photo editing app, tried a little "noise removal" and then did an "unsharp".  I'm not sure I really know what I'm doing, but liked this final version a lot better.

Cuthbert got tired of loafing under the "sunlamp". He moved over and decided to loaf on the kitchen stool instead.

Rosalie