Fuzzy Flower - Brazilian Dimensional Embroidery

In the interest of forming "good" habits, I'm trying to post notes about Brazilian embroidery on a regular basis.  This is the "Fuzzy Flower" --it's from my Millefiori design #857 "Crazy Quilt Pillow".
     Have you ever tried Cire or Nova for your turkey work? It's wonderful!  Because it isn't so tightly twisted, it ravels to nice, lovely, smooth fuzz. I didn't use it here, but I once made a design called "My Dolly" and used Nova for her hair. I made really long loops, snipped them before dunking her in the bathtub (to remove blue lines) and when she came out her hair looked like I had hot-ironed it.
     If you stitch the "Fuzzy Flower", I'd recommend giving Cire a try.

By the way, I don't do traditional Turkey Work. I do something called a Knotted Turkey Stitch where I tie a knot in my floss (accidently on purpose). When the knot reaches the fabric, there is a loop on top. Voila~~  Turkey Work! If you put enough of these really close together, they won't pull out.

Back to Fuzzy.  To finish this flower, I just made double cast-on stitches on each side to look like a pod, and I tacked the double cast-on on one side only. Here's a picture of the finished design (part of the Crazy Quilt Pillow):

If I stitched this again, I'd try Cire.

     And now, a message from my garden. ...

Remember those rhodies I bought at the Rhody Field Clearance. Here's the pretty pink one:

And not to be outdone, the red peony outside my kitchen window is just screaming for attention:

Of course, when I went to the garden center, I just couldn't leave the most beautiful flowers there, so I brought one or two of them home. I bought this planter JUST because I loved the color combination of #134 and #207 (and didn't have to worry about color bleed, for sure!)

Tucked in with these yellow daisies and purple petunias were some lovely #114 and #007 callibrachoa flowers:

This geranium in "Go Big Red" Nebraska colors (my husband will be soooo happy...) is also from the garden center:

And my final two flowers on this post, now also in bloom in my garden, are a Korean Lilac shrub and one of my iris.

Couldn't you just fall into that #070 lilac and die a thousand happy deaths? The flowers are small and the bloom time is short, but it looks really pretty this year.
    Here's the iris:

...and with all of this lovely Oregon rain, everything is just bursting into bloom.

I'm originally a Flatlander (Nebraska, 10" of rain a year), so you probably won't hear me very often complain about Oregon's rain (40" per year), or even Oregon Mist which is actually "wannabe" rain.

Rosalie