I love the  intense vibrancy of autumn, the turning leaves combining in the garden with ‘all the golden oranges and reds of late summer’. In my garden, orange dahlias with bronze foliage shoot up next to the Virginia creeper, and banks of persicaria, with their deep rose flower heads and spade-like leaves sprinkled with rusty marks of incipient decay, look wonderful against the spindles’ leaves of many colours. It is this chaos of colour that I tried to capture here, stitching freely with no sketch or outline, weaving stems in and out of each other, adding flowers over leaves and passing stems across flowers. The kit contains a piece of antique French linen screen printed with a simple design (the completed design is roughly 12cm square), the idea being that you can either stitch just what is there or add more of the same. I urge you to try the latter. It is a good kit for making that first leap away from following only the printed line. You are told how to stitch every element, and will have plenty of practice stitching them from printed versions, but then add more! A beautiful, detailed drawing of the completed design is included as a guide. A lovely selection of autumnal threads, many from the Gentle Art range, is included on a full-colour thread card.

You don’t have to paint the little vase, but it is really easy. There is a free download on my website home page about painting on linen. If you don’t fancy painting the vase, it is small enough to ‘paint’ with your needle in a colour of your choice.

The price includes postage to all areas of the United Kingdom.