Earth - Quotes "The earth laughs in flowers....."

"The Earth laughs in flowers"    is a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson, a nineteenth century American Philosopher - this was the starting point for this piece. 

It is a wholecloth piece dyed and discharged to achieve a textured natural background using Gocco screens I made to discharge the flower images before adding some Inktense pigment to some of the flowers in the foreground.

I machine embroidered flower outlines through the wadding but left some of discharged images  unstitched to give a softer distant effect. Whilst I initially used Jacquard discharge paste for the first discharging, I used Decollorant with pigment to remove and add colour at the same time for some of the flowers.

Jean