Anne's Creations: Tutorial: How to sew foxgloves and irises

Today's Tutorial ^ !

Truth be told, these are my favorite flowers to embroider. They are also one of the easiest! If you mastered my delphinium tutorial, than this will be just as easy.

First off, determine what sort of colors you would like your flowers to be. Foxgloves are best in hues of pink and purple and irises can be any shade and still look lovely. For this tutorial, I have chosen pink foxgloves and purple shades for the irises.

To embroider the foxglove, you must first stitch a long green stem with two to four plies of green embroidery floss. I like to use four, but this stem will only be viewed in portions, so its up to you. Once you have your green stem, thread your silk ribbon through your chenille needle and bring it up an inch or so up the stalk.

Stitch a downwards ribbon stitch for the petals. A ribbon stitch is when you bring the needle through the ribbon, giving that nice curled edge. For the first petal, I like to leave a bit of room between the petal and the stem. Like the delphinium, you will be stitching over and across the stem, so its best to only sew through the ribbon when placing your ribbon stitch petals.

Here is my second petal, directly beneath where the first stitch came up.

The completed stitch.

For this foxglove, I freehand stitched all across the stem. I didn't stick to downward stitches, resulting in a more free form flower. I strongly believe in stitching however you feel like it- silk ribbon embroidery is extremely forgiving and just about anything looks good! Here are more traditionally stitched foxgloves using the downwards stitching that I mentioned:

Marvelous! If you have any questions on this, comment or email me at Serynarpc@gmail.com.
Onto the irises!

These are one of the most relaxing flowers to stitch. If you know how to stitch a flystitch you already know how to make this flower. Now I hate memorizing the names of stitches, so I'm simply going to show you in pictures (lots of pictures!) how to stitch the iris. This is another flower where you can stitch out of turn- stitch the bottom first, or the top.

There are two sorts of irises, closed and open. I will show you both.

After you place your stitch and leave the ribbon in a loose 'u' shape, bring the ribbon up at the bottom curve of the 'u'.

Place the stitch downwards in a simple straight stitch- be sure to leave some space the length of one ribbon.

Like so:

Now go below the first stitch and do the exact same thing- create a loose 'u'. Yet this time, bring the ribbon through the straight stitch that you created.