Those Pansies

I've been slow in posting...my laptop fried including the external hard drive. Luckily all of my files were finally recovered intact, and a whole bunch of dollars later, I'm back in business. I have to say, it was kind of nice to be free of the laptop for a short while. I devoted more time to actually working on projects such as my Silk Scene.

I had reached a conundrum of sorts:  what to start filling in with around the main parts of the Silk Scene. It was kind of daunting but I finally hunched down and decided to stitch some smaller plants to add perspective and some color. Enter Pansies....I consulted with several of my silk ribbon books and which way to make them with what I had on hand. It really does matter how you make a specific flower (in this case) according to the size of the ribbon used. I had 4mm ribbon so it looked like I could use tiny straight stitches for the petals in  2 colors. The top two petals are a dark burgundy (used in the foxgloves), and the lower three are a dusky peach. I stitched the top 2 petals first, then stitched the bottom three: one on the left, the right one and the middle one last.

Small pansy buds consisted of two tiny straight stitches of each color, slightly overlapping. I filled in the flower with a yellow center using a bright yellow floche in a one wrap French knot.

Next I added the stems in a green floche and a tiny lazy daisy green "leaf" between the top two petals (as you see in the photo below).

Each flower bud had a tiny lazy daisy stitch on one side and two small straight stitches on the other. Japanese Ribbon Stitch leaves in a variegated 4mm ribbon were clustered at the bottom of the stems.
After I finished three pansy plants around the Scene I wanted to add some ferns: I love ferns and have several varieties in my own yard. So here's the start of the first fern plant in front of the wall using one strand of floss in either a stem or outline stitch.

Now I have to stitch some more ferns around the scene and figure out what's after that. Slowly but surely!!