Over The Rainbow Hills Stitchscape

You know that mad feeling you get sometimes, when you are rummaging through your fabric stash, where you just need to throw hundreds of colours into a hoop and make a really wacky, fantastical stitchscape purely for fun? I got that feeling the other day. Why be sensible and make realistic landscapes or woodland scenes when there are fabrics just screaming out to be made into huge spotted, multi-coloured mountains! You can almost hear them shouting it; 'I am destined to be a bright red with purple and turquoise spots mountain.....'


..... Perhaps not. But I still love this fun, mischievous piece for its lack of consideration for natural colours. It was a great chance to just really go where the fabric wanted me to go and not try to make anything else of it. The batik spotted mountains were already perfect shapes as they are both from a batik set charm pack (fabrics already pre-cut into a certain size square for quilting) so they had the pointed quality which I just wiggle-cut into a softer hillside shape.

It's a pretty bold statement with the red background and purple/turquoise satin stitch splodges edged with back stitch quite literally hopping off the calico towards you. I still wonder whether I should have edged the bottom of the mountain with bullion knots as well, it probably didn't need it, but I like the way it then makes the metallic bullion knot flowers move around and the straight stitch stems lift off of the fabric below.

The flowers have been created with two strand straight stitch stems, topped with two strand metallic DMC embroidery thread (always a bit of a nightmare to knot with) and grounded with two strand long fly stitches in two different coloured sections. I really like what the fly stitches do to these flowers, they look much more organic on the 'ground' than just with the stems and knots.

I went with metallic bullion knots because with so much colour going on around them, choosing one colour to go with it all seemed impossible, and I didn't want to mix up the flower colours either as that would then be total colour overload! The metallic is a good compromise because it's not just a grey colour but picks up flashes of light and reflects the colours around it - plus it adds to the fantastical vibe in this piece, why shouldn't the landscape have sparkly flowers?

The back of this is just as lovely as the front in my opinion. Can you tell that there are actually three slightly different shades of turquoise in this piece?

Now for the facts; embroidered in a 15cm (6") hoop, the stitch list for this extravaganza is: satin stitch, back stitch, straight stitch, running stitch, bullion knots, french knots, fly stitch, seed stitch, whip stitch (vertical and horizontal), stem stitch and cross stitch.
Nice and easy and fun!