Clover

  My desk has been full of equipment just so that I can see to embroider these clover leaves! I had some lovely embroidery silks which are no longer in production so I wanted them used on something special. I worked on a type of silk fabric called 'paper silk' which is very fine but robust because I wanted to make an embroidered page to slip into one of the books on this piece. After the embroidery I wanted dew on the leaves but it can be a bit tricky with something like this as the scale and shape of the beads can ruin it if they are wrong...I hope I got it right! I used tiny miyuki seed beads and a few of the smallest magatama beads that I could get.

 Here they are off the hoop and ironed (carefully),then trimmed down, a little edge stitching and then pinned into place with black entomology pins. As I put them in place I found that the page I had chosen gave a lovely description by Herman Melville of an elaborate tattoo of leaves.