Spring Flowers in a blizzard

 Progress on my Scenes of Country Life, or Rural Pursuits Casket

If a person was to have a look at my ort box, they would think there was massive progress on this tiny little casket... but not really! Everything is just so tiny...I really have to make grand efforts to scale down my threads in order for things to still look delicate like I want, and not huge and clunky

 It is somewhat disappointing how long it takes to stitch such a little thing. Maybe I'm just a super slow stitcher? I am working the flowers around the scenes now. Most are long and short stitch with either just one or two plies of Soie Ovale...or a micro fraction of a strand of Soie Perlee.  One must get inventive with the tools available...see Soie Perlee is made from flat filament silk like Ovale...it is a twist of three 'plies'...but if you look further once you get those apart, you will note that each of those three plies, is each made up of three plies...it can be maddening really.

 Here is a peek at what I have named the Devil's Tulip. I had to work four of them on the two panels I'm stitching now, and have another three I am very much not looking forward to doing on the front panel when I get that far... I have several sizes of gimp on my table to pick from, but sadly the smallest size that would have been perfect was not made in the colours I wanted to use...so I had to use a larger size, much too big for the scale of the flower but I used it anyways. There was a million starts and stops, they are really just an absolute nightmare to stitch.

After the Devil's work, I had to redeem my spirit with a couple of regular pretty little happy pink tulips

Last night I worked this little iris. I like it. It's tiny, fits under my thumb, and no, I don't think I have very large thumbs. I am saving all the foliage for last. I have one more iris to work today, I can't decide if it should be peaches or purples...I keep going back and forth. I have the corresponding friezes drawn on above each panel, so I am able to make sure the colours below will complement the colours that will sit above it. It's currently blizzarding in southern Colorado, for us, really the first measurable impactful snow other than a dusting, of this whole fall/winter season. I don't really care for snow anymore, it gives me great anxiety, so its the perfect day to concentrate on spring flowers and NOT look out the window

Happy Stitching!