A creative weekend and strange plant memories

 

At last, some creative time squeezed in this weekend!  Sue  and I had scheduled a 'play date' for Sunday afternoon to look at the results of  our rust dyeing  workshop with Alice Fox and to  do some sewing. So  Saturday was spent assembling bits to work on including some Journal Quilts ( more on that in another post)   and finally getting round to trimming down and facing the first challenge  for 'International Threads' group. I'm embarrassed to say that we're now   on our  fifth ( although I've completed others in between)
It has been almost finished for a long time.  A wholecloth piece of Japanese silk shibori  layered over an African damask ,  it's been a labour of love, hand stitched  using a variety  of loops and other stitches  trying out techniques from Helen Parrott's book. It's accompanied  me on several train journeys, the format of 40 x 80 cm being a good travel piece to work on.
It looks quite sinister and plant-like  reminding me of the carrion flower so I'm calling it 'Red Stapelia' .

At one time in the  small glasshouse at work  where we  had plants that had originally been grown in the lab, there was an enormous Stapelia that took up most of a bench, very  ' Little Shop Of Horrors' .  The smell was something else.... It even had a proper engraved  label which besides  the accession number and  family, genus, species details also bore the  plants name :' Cedric the Poo Plant'. Alas Cedric is no more, removed when the  glasshouse changed use many years ago