This is a photo of a needle point piece that my mother made in 1988. It hangs with a companion piece made by my father over our bed. I have always loved this look into a cottage garden. I needed to do another distorted cross stitch piece for my home work for Level II stitch class so I chose this needle point piece as my inspiration. The original needle point is 11″ x 15″ and the cross stitch piece was to be 3″ x 3.75″ so I decided to make the garden a bit simper and leave out all the buildings.
Here is what I started with as a background. I fused these pieces down to the background.
Here’s the end result. I used distorted cross stitch throughout except on the wall and the cobblestone path. I used straight stitch for those. I didn’t like the color of the wall after I got finished so I darkened it up a bit with Inktense pencils. I’m pleased with the results and actually liked doing this one better than the first because I had an inspiration to follow. Does it look like a garden to you?
Ruth Lane Art 
Looks lovely – just like my cottage garden, except my walls are grey colour – somerset blue lias stone!
Wow, that's really cool!
Very nice!
Wow! I'm impressed with the whole process. It looks great.
Ruth this is absolutely gorgeous and i thinks its beautiful that your inspiration came from a piece your mum made all those years ago. Did you fuse your background pieces using that iron on webbing or something, it absolutely looks like a cottage garden. I really really love your first one to, inspiration or not that one worked out beautifully 🙂
Really like the embroidery on your cottage piece. I just bought some intense blocks but haven't been brave enough to use them yet. I also wanted to say thanks for sending the info on the program at FVCC. I just can't imagine when I would find the time to do it. I am leaving for two weeks on Monday – 5 days in AZ followed by 9 days in CA. I'm taking a two day ribbon cockades class, a millinery class and then we will be doing some felting classes. Hopefully I will get those intense blocks out when I return – have you used them on felt yet?
Ruth, of course it looks like a garden!! It's absolutely fantastic. Saw it yesterday, but didn't have time to comment. You have really excelled yourself with this. Congratulations.
Your garden is very beautifull. This distorted cross stich is wonderfull. Congratulations.
Hi Ruth – just been catching up on your lovely posts! Loved this cottage garden – very creative, all that hand stitching – great to see it from inception.