A Pansy in Brazilian Dimensional Embroidery

This is my pansy, stitched in Brazilian dimensional embroidery. It's one of the small floral oval designs featured in the book My LadyFlowers (by Yrs Truly, Rosalie Wakefield). Those little background leaves are two fly stitches, one upside down, and the other right-side up. 
      I'm working on my website http://www.millefiori-be.com/ and posting flowers and remembered how much fun it was to design these little floral vignettes.

     The ruffled pansy was inspired by one of my own pansies. When the ruffled pansies first appeared a few years ago, I bought a "nice selection" (meaning almost every one I could find that was a different color/pattern), brought them home, parked them on my picnic table and took a picture of each one. Here is the pansy that inspired the embroidery shown above:

I thought the colors of this pansy were really striking. Here's another picture, of a ruffled pansy (I have forgotten the name of the pansy variety):

Pansies last only until the weather gets really hot here in western Oregon, but that's OK.  It doesn't get really hot until at least mid-June or July. We can plant them very early in the spring and enjoy them for a long time!

Well, while I was uploading my designs (I'm only halfway done), I found a picture of one of the "Jewels" (Millefiori design #911 -- the front cover of the book, My LadyFlowers) that I liked. This design is named Camille and Queen Anne and the Camellia flower features The Comma, a stitch combining a cast-on and a bullion that I developed waaay, waaaaay back in 1993 for the first two tropical flower books that I wrote, Free Spirit and Tropical Breeze.

     Have I been having fun for a LONG time, or what?!

Here's a picture of Camille and Anne:

 By the way, those leaves on the Queen Anne's Lace (also known as Wild Carrot) are something I called "Carrot Feathers". If you look closely, you'll see that I first made a long straight stitch for the stem. Next, I couched long-tailed fly stitches (with a really long tacking stitch), one mirroring another on each side of the stem - making the stem curve when I felt like it.

    
I invite you to come back often and visit my website. I should have everything up fairly soon. Lately, however, my garden has been looking for me to come out and play.

By the way -- most people who live in western Oregon are used to some rainy days (understatement) and lots of overcast days (overstatement), but in today's issue of The Oregonian the headline had an interesting description of "the sun". See:

Ha, ha.  "Scary-Bright Ball."
     Last year The Oregonian, after three months or more of non-stop rain, had a headline in one of the June issues that read: "Dear Rain: You win. Sincerely, Portland."
     ...and it's the rain that makes the flowers grow, so we can't really complain.