Silk Ribbon Embroidered Fuchsias

A while back, on an afternoon when i wanted to play with ribbon embroidery, I had the idea of making a circular drawstring reticule for an American Girl doll. I wanted a very simple shape so that i could focus on making lots of silk ribbon embroidered fuchsias to run around the sides.

I hadn’t played with fuchsias for a while, and fuchsias are so much fun to embroider (and to spell – you can put the s’s and c’s just about anywhere and the word still makes sense), so I took a piece of bright purple silk about the right size for a dolly reticule and scrunched it up to get an idea of how large the purse would need to be, and then I ironed it flat again, basted in two concentric circles for placement lines, and I pulled out my silk ribbon box and went to town.

At the end of the afternoon it belatedly occurred to me (Oh, WHY is “belated’ such a regularly occurring word when I talk about sewing projects?!) that if one DID use the fabric I was working on to make a circular drawstring reticule, the ruching and gathering of the fabric would make all the carefully embroidered flowers pretty much illegible.   Or worse, invisible within the gathered folds of fabric.

Experiments proved my forebodings to be right, but the fuschias (see what I did there?) were going splendidly, so I kept at it, and decided to turn the fucsias (see, there it is again) it into one of my silk ribbon embroidery pouches instead.

I admit that a rectangular jewellery pouch, when contrasted with the circle of embroidery, looks a little odd: design-wise, there’s a lot of dead space.  But after all the fuss I’d had already with the circles, I wasn’t planning on wasting another minute with any more of that nonsense. Straight lines it would be.

For the lining – my silk scrap bag had an an absolutely lovely piece of green silk taffeta that matched the saturation of the purle, and I carefully cut that lining about a centimeter shorter than the purple silk, so that the purple would roll over into the casing for the drawstring.  The silk ribbon embroidered fuchsias (or fucuscias) and the purple are the stars of the show. The bright lining is a surprise. The only person who will see that electric green flash is the person who will own – and use – it!