Put Your Feet Up by Di Kirchner

Crewel embroidery is a favourite technique among the needlework community the world over. Its popularity ensures it features frequently in our magazines and books, which, in itself, is just a reflection of how much our talented designers enjoy developing stunning pieces using this fabulous technique.

A master at crewel embroidery, Di Kirchner has taken a beautifully unusual step with her latest project in A Passion for Needlework 4 – The Whitehouse Daylesford. She’s turned her prodigious talent to a floral design with her piece entitled Put Your Feet Up, which is as Australian as kangaroos and beaches.

This is the second of Di’s magnificent crewel embroidered footstools that we’ve had the pleasure of bringing you – the first being Four Corners, which was published as one of our special Handpicked projects.

With Put Your Feet Up, rather than drawing on her wealth of experience in Jacobean crewel design, Di has looked out her own window and drawn inspiration from the fantastic flowers growing in the Australian countryside.

Right at the centre of this bouquet is a fiery red waratah surrounded by a beautifully symmetrical arrangement. Within it you’ll find banksia flowers, kangaroo paw, bottlebrush, gum blossoms, hakea, grevillea and the fluffiest wattle flowers you could imagine.

The rich reds and pinks are completely true to life. So often, to achieve such bold colours, a designer may stylise their flowers, but Di is lucky enough to be able to work with blooms that are already brilliant, just as nature created them.

Di has balanced each bloom perfectly to ensure that the individual colours stand out and are set off by the ones around it. She’s also succeeded in emulating the glorious textures of all of the flowers, especially the pom-pom-like wattle, the spiky bottlebrush and the plump hakea.

She’s selected precisely the right techniques to give a realistic effect. This means once you’ve mastered the process Di explains in easy-to-follow, step-by-step detail, you can get on with enjoying the satisfaction of seeing each flower emerge from the linen as you place your stitches.

By mounting Put Your Feet Up into a footstool, you’ll create a piece of heirloom furniture for your house. Of course, there will be some of you who would be far too afraid that someone might come into the living room after a day of gardening or walking in nature and put their dirty feet on to your exquisite embroidery!

We would hope that the glory of this project would make even the weariest person stop to look.

However, if you have any fear, Put Your Feet Up would look just as magnificent framed and hung on the wall where there would be no risk of a muddy shoeprint!

Bring the air of Australia into your house with Di Kirchner’s stunning floral bouquet. Put Your Feet Up will be a project to be proud of, no matter how you choose to mount it.

It will bring as much pleasure in the stitching as it will in the years of admiring it after it is complete. No muddy boots allowed!

Make Your Own Put Your Feet Up

Step 1 – Purchase Project Instructions

Put Your Feet Up by Di Kirchner depicts vibrant Australian flowers in crewel embroidery, perfect for a footstool.

Step 2 – Purchase Ready-To-Stitch Kit

The Inspirations Ready-To-Stitch kit for Put Your Feet Up includes everything* you need to re-create these vibrant blooms: Fabrics (inc. with pre-printed design), embroidery threads and needles.

*Please Note: To cater for flexibility of purchase, instructions are not included with our kits. For step-by-step directions on how to create this project, please refer to the book.