Bluebell Woods Stitchscape

It's finished! My Bluebell Woods Stitchscape has blossomed and grown into a fantastically textured and colourful piece, which is hopefully full of little delights and imagination. Could you picture yourself walking through these trees, ducking under low branches just beginning to wear their green finery and stepping over patches of clustered blue bells, humming with bees and insects busy about their business? 

My only minor worry with this embroidery is that it might be a tad too busy- but then woodlands don't arrange themselves into any kind of order, they just grow into their own personal tangle, so perhaps I shouldn't worry so much. I do prefer my pieces to grow organically and try not to over think placement and stitch composition, this is how the stitchscape wanted to be so I have to trust my instinct and go with it. I do love it nonetheless.

As mentioned in my previous post about this piece, it is incredibly textured. Bullion knots sit on top of other bullion knots, and my leafy french knots in the trees seem to float on top of the fabric (love those fat french knots). I can't stop running my hands over it and feeling all of the different types of thread I've used and the different stitches snuck in.

I think a little run down is in order for this newest addition to my stitchscape collection. It has been stitched in a 30cm hoop so is amongst one of my larger pieces. Stitches used were; bullion knots, french knots, long stitch, couching, whip stitch, running stitch, back stitch, fly stitch, seed stitch and satin stitch. Plus beading. I am also the proud owner of a very sore and blistered thumb, and various holes in my fingertips- sometimes you have to suffer for your art!

I really like the way the top half offsets the lower half. I pondered for a while on how to work the branches and the trees. After making the trees with shaped branches and layering the different colours of fabrics to imitate tree clusters, I did wonder how I was going to make the tree branches work- in previous stitchscapes my trees have just been trunks with no discernible branches. I spent a long time in the garden staring at the branches of the trees and seeing how they tapered and twisted (the neighbours probably thought I was nuts), then decided to recreate this using scrappy long stitches twisting off from the main fabric branches. You can just about see bits of this underneath the french knots which were made using some Stylecraft DK acrylic yarn I had lying around in my wool basket. Extra branches were added afterwards to fill some more of the space with some lighter long stitches jutting off the main trunks. I'm not sure I would rush to do my trees like this again but I do love those french knot clusters.