Foliage

 I've been stitching foliage the last couple of days. This is the only way I will have foliage since I have a black thumb. I would love to grow flowers and have a vegetable garden, but apparently I do not have the gift. Dearly Beloved does, so he gets that activity in the division of labor.

However, I now have stripey leaves on the Elizabethan Rose project I'm taking from Zina Kazban.

They will have all sorts of embellishment before it's all over, but this is the start.

And there is foliage on Ann Kemp's sampler:

So now I'm adding flowers to those branches and leaves. 

I really wish I knew more about Ann Kemp. She has some motifs on her sampler that are textbook perfect, like her pinkes and the apple baskets. But then she has a wild group of vines and leaves and flowers that twine and twist and flourish all around the handle of the basket. I'd love to know what her embroidery teacher thought about this--did she encourage her or did she shake her head and sigh? I guess we'll never know.

I am enjoying stitching after a couple of days of feeling like a zombie. I never felt ill--but I really was sleepy, as in sitting up straight with a needle in my hand, sound asleep. This is my usual reaction to the Covid shot, but I think having the flu shot on top of it multiplied the effects. Anyway, now I can sit up straight with a needle in my hand and actually stitch.