Garden Symphony by Margaret Lee

Margaret Lee is always thinking of ways to combine daily life with embroidery. 

While her outstanding career includes the creation of some of the most remarkable and lifelike embroidered portraits of both animals and landscapes you will ever see, there is also a prolific number of projects she has created that are all about taking things we use day-to-day and elevating their beauty through the magic of embroidery.

Margaret’s project Garden Symphony from her latest book The Art of Bead Embroidery Japanese-Style 2 is a highly functional folio featuring colourful Jacobean-style flowers and leaves worked on a dark navy background.

This spectacular zipped folio can be used to house a notebook, tablet, diary or just be a safe place to store your paperwork.

In her own words, Margaret tells us a little more about this remarkable piece:

‘Inspired by Jacobean-era patterns, the leaves in this design are given equal prominence to the flowers for a colourful display.

The ground fabric used in this project is a deep navy. This dark colour will have a strong bearing on any transparent beads used, especially light-coloured ones. 

Borrowing from the traditional Yuzen dyeing style, all the design elements are coloured. This serves to enrich the bead colours and complement the bead embroidery techniques used.’

‘Different size beads are used to create form. The small leaves are stitched in different ways with different colour combinations to create linear dimension and visual interest.’

Ask any designer which projects are their favourite and you’ll often get an ambiguous, non-committal response akin to ‘they are like children in my family, how do you pick a favourite’, however when we were putting together this book with Margaret it would be fair to say she was rather fond of Garden Symphony.

If you love beading and enjoy taking your needlework to the next level with the added benefit of creating a project you will receive great joy from using day in and day out, Garden Symphony is well worth considering.

PS – As you would expect when any artisan of Margaret’s pedigree flexes their creative muscle, this project is rich with materials. Featuring 60 different types, sizes and colours of beads, this is one project that you might want to consider buying a kit for to save you time sourcing all the requirements yourself.

All the materials you need to re-create this project have been sourced for you in our Ready-to-Stitch kit, with the instructions available separately in the book The Art of Bead Embroidery Japanese-Style 2.