This will be a post in two parts.

I realised a funny thing the other day – that this (along with, I suppose, the Hawthorn Blossom) are not miniatures, but rather larger than life. This made by chuckle silently inside. I’m sad like that.

Soooooo. Black Henbane. I think it is a gorgeous flower:

And I wanted to capture all that lovely veiny detail, obvs. I decided to do a similar thing to the aforementioned Hawthorn Blossom and make detached wired slips.

And I got some nice heavy white cotton and using fine machine silk, couched it down:

The little holes are where I made a mistake and used the wrong colour. That done I took the correct shade of variegated olive green silk and started to attempt to  interpret that beautiful vein structure.

Now, don’t tell me the veins should be purple. I am using the picture above as my guide and I see them as greenish. But to enhance this, I used a nice dull aubergine silk to add detail:

At this point I was feeling like this wasn’t going to look like Henbane but I press on. Perhaps a much finer thread for the leaves would have been better?

Using 2 threaded needles I finished off the slip with buttonhole stitch using both cream and purple silks. Here’s the first completed one:

Rinse and repeat…

Yeah, so at this point I did feel like it might resemble said bloom at the end of it. Two more to go and the final construct…