nasturtiums and dahlias

Sunday saw us spending our last day of the Summer holidays driving around the M25 to celebrate my Godmother and her husband's 40th wedding anniversary. Despite the journey it was a fabulous day, the food was delicious, guests ate lunch on trestle tables in the garden and everyone's children played together idyllically (the majority of the time). Amazingly we arrived at our destination 1/2 hour before we were due so we decided to find the nearest play ground and let the children use up some of their pent up energy before unleashing them at a grown up lunch party. And thus it was that we found ourselves in a car park by a village hall that happened to be setting up for the Annual Kent Dahlia Society show. And there in a 70's flower power array of madness were all the 'rejects' and they were being sold off at the fantastically tantalising price of £1 for 5. I couldn't resist. Though in all honesty I think they looked better in a huge display of vibrant colours and statement shapes but we didn't have space in the car to bring them all home. Even some of what we had got bashed by and tired, flailing arms and legs and Tin Tin books as we drove slowly back around the M25 that evening. But not even those went to waste!


But back to the Ruby Wedding Anniversary celebrations. Whilst on the World Wide Web I discovered that a less well known gift for 40 years of marriage is the Nasturtium. This thrilled me. I have a metal trug full of neon flowers sprawling in front of my kitchen window, making me smile when the rain comes and clouds hide the view over the valley. I've been wanting to do something inspired by said trug for a while.

I've also been wanting to work on my (very) freestyle machine embroidery as well as use this new stuff I found called 'dissolvable'.* So after a little bit of rushed experimenting - of course I had left this to the last minute - the result was this card, which I presented with a packet of ruby red nasturtium seeds.


*Not sure that that's it's real name but they knew what I meant in the shop. It's like a sheet of plastic that you can put in your embroidery hoop and machine on as if it were fabric. Once finished you dissolve the plastic in water and you are left with just the stitches. Fantastic - you can see better examples of the result in this post.