On one of those days when routine crushes , I escaped, using the excuse of inspiration for a new book. I had taken out and printed an old alphabet and, without thinking too much about it, composed a collage of bouquet flowers. I had embroidered frantically all weekend, knowing that my inner tyrant would not allow any delays in registering for the course on full stitching and that on Monday, like a vulture on my right shoulder, she would hiss in my ear. I had twisted my neck again in just two days, after fixing it with months of strenuous yoga sessions and exercises, and when Monday inevitably arrived, my tyrannical self, and even my dissident self, had declared that the result was rubbish. So I went back to my elegant and orderly letters lined up in a row, albeit in no particular order.

But seeds had been sown in those days. And the shoots had not been slow to sprout: every now and then my eye would fall on the unfinished draft and unconsciously assess what to save and what to prune…

When I put together floral pieces for a new design, I am often torn between botanical rigour and improvisation. On the one hand, I feel the need to name the flowers (and this need deserves to be explored, but at the moment I have no words), on the other hand, I just want to make the aesthetic calculations add up, without necessarily having the embroidery faithfully reproduce reality. I tried, at least for the main flowers, to find references to existing species, but I got confused when I looked for colour combinations, primarily because… Alas! The colour chart is too limited!

I discovered that the colours of eucalyptus leaves do not exist. This disappointed me greatly. It forced me to stray from reproducing reality, thus finding myself constructing a palette that does not exist. Furthermore, to balance things out and avoid using too much white or pink in the composition, the anemones had to be blue. Stronger than me… I did some research to see if decorative anemones exist in blue and… Yes, they do! But the shade I had to select is desaturated, as if a patina of dust had settled over the years, transforming the bouquet into a nostalgic memory. As always, restrictions have the power to force us to think…