Flowers for a embroidered garden

I have been working on some dimensional embroidery flowers. I want to use a number of flowers for the Cabinet of Curiosities and these are the start of my garden.
The flowers are  Mariposa or butterfly lilies. They grow wild in the foothills and desert areas of western states but are very hard to grow in a garden. They are one of my favorite flowers.

The white one is a Sego Lily

worked in AVAS and the pink one is a Trailing Mariposa that is stitched in Chinese silk.

I designed and stitched a group of three Sego Lilies and really like how it turned out.

Corinithian Column - finished

It is finished!!! Finally Corinthian Column is finished. It took longer than I thought to do but it was fun to do and I learned so much. Here is the whole piece finished plus some close up pictures of parts of it. Now comes the challenge of trying to find a frame that is deep enough to work.

Here are the tops of the leaves. They are worked separately and then attached when the surface work is finished.

You can see just how much the top area is padded and sticks out from the surface.

Here is photo of the floor frame that I use with my slate frame. I now have it by a north window so the light is great. It has been in several places in the house but now it has a permanent place by my stitching chair.

Corinithian Column and Beaded baskets

I love starting projects and working on them. The process of stitching is so much fun and gives me hours of pleasure, but there is something really satisfying about finishing them. I have been working on Corinthian Columns by Cynthia Jackson for a long time. When life is running smoothly, I like to work on it an hour a day. Any longer and the back tends to hurt because I need to work on it on a slate frame that rests on a flat floor stand like the one for Japanese embroidery. I have now finished stitching all of the parts of  Corinthian Column and need to cut out and attach the tops of the leaves that are dimensional.
I will post those later but here are some photos of the gold work.

I am still in the planning stages of the Cabinet of Curiosities, but am going to work on more of the smalls that are part of the learning process. One of the fun things that was a project for a very few of the girls that did the original boxes was a beaded basket. The real beaded baskets are just amazing and the colors are still so bright because the beads don't sun fade like the embroidery threads. Tricia Nguyen has created some kits to replicate the original tiny sample baskets and had a contest for those who wished to try their hand at embellishing a beaded  basket. You can see the winners on her blog.- http://thistle-threads.blogspot.com/

I won a first prize for the 17th Century Multimedia basket. It was a challenge but fun to do. I usually am not a beader but stringing beads on thread and wire is not like doing any of the regular beading stitches. I have a small collection of tiny antique beads  but didn't end up using them for my basket.
Here are some of the flowers that I did for the basket.

The winner is Rachael Kinnison. Her basket  is to "die for". She is going to post her work on her blog at http://ladysrepositorymuseum.blogspot.com     It will be fun  not only to see the finished basket but how it grew. Just look for the 17th century beaded basket link along the side of her blog.