Foxgloves

Another extremely wet day although we don't have to worry about flooding because we are on top a 900 ft hill! One of the good things about this wet and damp Scottish weather is that foxgloves love these conditions. This is one flower I truely love. It has beautiful colours, going from white to pale yellow to pink and even purple. And the inside of the flower has spots in darker colours, very attractive to bees who love to crawl inside. In our courtyard I just let them seed themselves and every other year (they are biennuals) there is a magnificent show. This year is no exception and in the last few days they have really started their beautiful display.

Foxgloves have been an ongoing inspiration to me and this year was no exception. I had to make some fabric ATCs with an Abstract theme for a swap on ATcards and looked up all my leftovers from previous projects. The one I finally choose was an attempt to transfer print some of my foxglove pictures from previous years onto a space-dyed fabric. I did not iron this long enough (that will teach me to read those instructions!!!) and the images only partly transferred. This was no good for what I wanted at the time but proved just the thing for the abstract theme. I layered up the fabric with Fast2Fuse and stitched along the straight lines with a metallic thread by machine. I then cut this background into ATC sized pieces, added a button made of shell and added hand stitching with space-dyed silk yarn. I finished the cards by ironing fabric onto the other side of the Fast2Fuse and zigzag stitched the edges with the same green metallic yarn I used earlier.