Passion for Poppies

My love of poppies was rekindled yet again (!) by the late appearance of clumps of sumptuous oriental ones in my mother’s garden. They were surrounded by Michaelmas daisies and the glowing red and purple hues made for a heady colour combination in an otherwise drab October garden. How delicious!

This started out as a large piece of silk dupion which I painted with acrylic inks and outlined the flower shapes with alcohol markers. I must admit, there was an element of blankophobia and I felt happier once all the white was covered over and the embroidery started. I’ve begun some free machine embroidery on the flowers to create the textures of the petals and give a base for further beadwork, and stitching (hand or machine) I’m not sure yet. There is a lot to do to it as it’s quite large and I even toyed with the idea of cutting it up to make several smaller pieces but for now I think I will leave it intact. I wanted to make it look as if most of the poppies were being looked down on.  I have some gorgeous silk dip dyed threads which would look fabulous as hand stitched textures if I can bear to actually use them! I still want to get away from the bloomin’ obvious (excuse the pun), but with fme it seems that there is a level of inertia and I just find myself almost stitching in a trance rather than consciously choosing to place the stitches in a certain texture or pattern. I can’t wait to get my new embroidery software so I can add some digitized textures into the mix. It’s a playground for trying out different stitches, beads and threads and I just want to see what happens.

Update:

You can see the finished piece here.