Over the past six years or so our kitchen calendar has often been one by Hannah Dunnett, who combines paintings with Bible verses so organically that it is hard to say whether they are illustrated verses or paintings with lettering added. I have one of her posters in my craft room (Psalm 121, in case you’re wondering). Yes, I really like her work! Last year, some small trees on one of the calendar’s pages drew my attention. They reminded me of Psalm 1, which talks about the righteous being like trees planted by streams of water and bearing fruit. Their shapes were rather satisfying. Would they work in stitch, I wondered.

I decided they probably would, and first things first, contacted Hannah Dunnett to ask whether I could have a go at embroidering these trees as long as they were just for my own enjoyment, not for making into kits or chart packs. She thought that was a lovely idea and asked me to send pictures when I’d finished them. Permission having been obtained, the next step was to create usable outlines for transferring onto fabric. Some day I will start using a vector-based program, but getting to grips with one of those takes time, so until we retire from our main business I’m sticking with the photo editing program I’ve been using until now and which I know inside out.

Then it was a matter of choosing colours. For three of the trees I decided to stick more or less with the colours of the original, but the purply-red tree, having come from a different part of the design, didn’t quite fit in. From the start I envisaged it as an autumnal tree, with its green parts more towards the yellow end of the spectrum and some red, orange and yellow in it. As the green in the other trees leans more towards the blue end this meant that tree number four still didn’t completely match the rest of the set, but there – who says a designer needs to be consistent in everything .

Time to start stitching! Because these trees aren’t meant for anything other than my own pleasure this was a great opportunity to use lots of different threads from my stash, and to play with various stitches without too much planning. (I am constitutionally incapable of stitching without any planning at all, so there were some scribbled stitch ideas and notes on and around the printed outlines, but the process has been as unplanned as I can manage.) For fabric I chose a densely woven linen that needs no backing and allows for very precise stitch placement, and to begin with I picked Splendor silks for the apple tree and Heathway Milano wool for the autumnal one; later I added Caron threads for the tall tree (cypress? poplar?) and both coton à broder and floche for the fourth tree.

The main focus of the apple tree is, unsurprisingly, the apples, and I wanted them to stand out. To give them a bit of height I worked them in Rhodes stitch, but the first one looked a little uneven so I unpicked it and from then on worked split stitch outlines before covering them in Rhodes stitch, which made them much neater. For the green surrounding the apples I had to decide on the look I was after; Hannah Dunnett’s original is solidly coloured, but I felt that would be too heavy in stitch – not too mention far too much work! Seed stitch to the rescue: it looks properly green but still fairly airy.

I was really pleased with that little apple tree! But then at the end of July Covid hit the Figworthy household, and the tree planting ground to a halt. Even though this was just a fun project, I needed something even less challenging, and also smaller and easier to hold. I transferred the autumnal tree to a separate piece of fabric and over the next few months had a go at that, using Danish flower threads. This also gave me the opportunity to try out another stitch combination, as I’d scribbled down two different ones for this tree. It took until January (not least because my initial choice of vermicelli couching for the internal green didn’t work and had to be unpicked), but then I had a little tree worked in satin, split, stem and Palestrina stitch and colonial knots. It looks a bit flatter than I had expected, but it is decorative enough, and a good trial run for the one in the main project.

I couldn’t decide which of the other two trees to start on next, so I just worked on them both, alternating between what I’d started thinking of as the cypress tree and the one that didn’t really suggest any particular tree to me. My arboretum was now made up of Apple Tree, Autumn Tree, Cypress Tree and Nondescript Tree. Can you see where this might be going…?

In the planning there was an element of padding or some sort of 3D-ness in all the trees, and in Cypress Tree that was mostly the wavy outline, for which I “bunch couched” a bundle of 8 lengths of Caron Wildflowers – very dark green on one side, slightly less dark green on the other. As these trees were always meant as a slightly experimental project, great for trying out things, I decided on striped raised stem stitch for the centre swirl. It’s a bit fiddly but does produce a lovely effect. With all the needle manipulation necessary for this stitch it would have been sensible to have done it before the couched outline, but heigh ho, it’s all a learning process! The vermicelli couching I had reluctantly abandoned in the Autumn Tree also found a place here, and that was another tree completed.

Meanwhile I’d also started the Autumn Tree on my main fabric, this time in wool. The raised element here was going to be the padded satin stitch swirls in red, orange and yellow, so after the split stitch stem and whipped stem stitch foliage outline I worked a split stitch base for the red swirl.

Then I started covering it in slanted satin stitch. But when I got to the tip it didn’t look right. I left it temporarily, did a less challenging orange swirl, unpicked the red satin stitch and re-did it with the slant in the opposite direction. I didn’t like the look of that either. So that’s where the Autumn Tree is stuck for now. I’ll get back to it.

The same can’t be said for the Nondescript Tree. The trouble is that it is the least interesting of the four. It doesn’t have the coloured swirls of the Autumn Tree, or the bright apples of the Apple Tree, or the unusual shape of the Cypress Tree. For the “leaves” inside the tree’s crown I couldn’t really think of anything other than padded satin stitch, and that was already in use in another tree. In order to give the creative process a nudge I decided to leave the leaves for the moment and to work the outline of the foliage in yet another stitch (or perhaps more accurately, a technique) I’d not tried before: trailing.

This encompasses laying string or cord (or a bundle of thinner threads) on the line that is to be covered, and then couching this into place with stitches that completely cover the string. It’s very textural, and using a bundle of threads means you can trim some of them towards the end of a line to taper it (a bit like you would in gold cutwork, like Bruce’s tail). I used floche to cover my bundle of string, and found the effect very pleasing – rather smooth and satiny. Taking my couching stitches through the fabric precisely enough was quite tricky, and my line is not perfect – there is a bit of a kink – but all in all I’m happy with the look, and with the taper.

And yet. And yet I am abandoning this tree. It has been really useful in getting me to try out trailing, which is a technique I will definitely use in future designs, but as a whole I simply can’t give it its own character, its USP so to speak. So my arboretum will be a trio of trees. That is to say, if I can get that padded satin stitch to work…