Hello and welcome to our new Alphabet Garden tapestry. Teddy is a keen gardener and you’ll often find him watering his plants or tending to his beehive. Everyone knows that bears like honey and this chap is no exception!
Teddy is never short of company in the garden. His friends the cat, tortoise and blackbird are always nearby, as are the hens and ducks, and a rabbit (investigating teddy’s carrot crop) and, of course, a Jack Russell.
Alphabet Garden is packed full of detail and will delight both the stitcher and the lucky recipient. There is so much to see in this design. We’ve cropped some details of the borders to give you a closer look, so let’s see what’s going on…
Along the top banner there is a tortoise eating grass and leaves, and the most magnificent rainbow over the name and numbers panel!
On the lower edge there is a cockerel and a little pond with a duck and duckling. Just look at that patchwork alphabet garden, isn’t it wonderful!
TOP TIP and a quick chat about the name panel The main design of Alphabet Garden is accurately printed in fifteen glorious colours. We supply charts with Alphabet Garden to enable you to personalise your design. There is lots of space for you to add words or dates in the top name panel, and if you run out of space the path beneath teddy’s wellies is another area to consider, perhaps with lettering running down, eg:
12
6
2023
Facebook friends will have seen clever stitchers use the tree trunk on Tree of Life in this way (check out our Tree of Life Album), but we digress…back to Alphabet Garden. Let’s have a look at the right-hand side of the design. It’s so cute with tall sunflowers and the hen perched on the picket fence, and the cheeky rabbit about to sample teddy’s carrots.
On the other side of the tapestry a black cat lazes in a tree, with a Jack Russell terrier below. The Jack Russell would normally be pestering teddy for a walk, but on gardening days he’s quite content to potter about and enjoy the company of teddy and friends.
A little bit of history Many years ago, in 2001, I designed a tapestry called Teddy’s Garden. Teddy’s Garden contained some of the elements that we see now in Alphabet Garden – a central teddy watering his/her alphabet garden, and animals and leaves in the borders.
Some of you will have stitched Teddy’s Garden and we wonder how old the children you stitched it for are now! For those of you who didn’t see Teddy’s Garden, here it is:
I was always very fond of Teddy’s Garden and it was a popular design for many years, but we would sometimes receive calls from stitchers who liked the design but wished that it could be a similar size to some of our other birth sampler tapestry kits. Teddy’s Garden was square but most of our other new baby/young child tapestries in our Kits with Alphabets category are rectangular.
And so a mere twenty-two years later we have the new Alphabet Garden, which is no longer a square design as Teddy’s Garden was. In its new size it’s a great companion for Alphabet Ark, Alphabet Cats and Dogs, Alphabet Owls and many of the other designs in our Kits with Alphabets category.
Looking ahead to February and March We do hope you like our new Alphabet Garden tapestry. Over the next months we will be bringing you more new designs, so be sure to read your newsletters when they arrive.
We have been extremely productive in the last few months so newsletters will be arriving more frequently than they used to. Don’t worry, each newsletter will contain exciting news and a subscriber treat. We made a promise: We only email you when we have something to say. That’s the deal!
Thanks for reading our latest update, and newsletter subscribers we hope you’re enjoying our shorter newsletters and familiarising yourselves with our blog. There’s a lot to read on here. If you’ve finished a tapestry and plan to send it to us before your own garden beckons you can take a quick look at some of our fabric selections. We used Carnation Red woolly fabric for piping and backing of Alphabet Garden.
Happy February, and I do hope you like these first few months of the year as much as I do. The daffodils are coming up, it’s snowdrop season, and for us in south Somerset we hope that the winter floods are over for now!
Best wishes and happy stitching,
Kelly x
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