Lynne Stone - an inspiration

Many of you may have seen my buddy Lynne Stone and the astonishing native flowers that she constructs from wire and embroidery on Gardening Australia (Series 32, Episode 3)  Start watching from 45’26”.

Lynne has been a close friend for nearly 50 years. She is a botanical artist, working in three-dimensional embroidery.  She inspired me to start on my exploration of colours, forms and textures that resulted in Australian Landscape Jewellery and the work I do now. She was my first and continuing inspiration.

Some few years ago I commissioned NSW glass artist Bev Butler to produce me some Eucalyptus blossom beads and asked Lynne to produce some leaves and flower caps for me so I could make some Eucalyptus Blossom necklaces. This is what I came up with.

The pieces I make now are nowhere near as complicated, just a flower or a bud and a couple of leaves.

She produces some astonishingly real-looking flowers. As she says, the Callistemon took her nearly 20 years to finish, experiment upon experiment, refining all the while. Other pieces may not have taken as long, but the results are no less spectacular.

Her work is found in the Australian National Botanic Garden in Canberra (her first Government commission), the National Museum of Australia, also in Canberra (her most recent commission) as well as in private collections all over the world.

A piece of her work is in the Marysville Visitors’ Centre, as Marysville in Victoria is where she lives.  In fact, it’s the one on the cover of her book. 

She says she wrote the book as ‘……… a record of the methods I use to create my Botanical Studies using machine embroidery, wire and hand dyeing. My embroideries are exercises in problem solving that somehow result in beautiful representations of our wonderful Australian native flowers.  I can never say that my solution is the only one, just the best I have found so far. Over the years I’ve tried countless ways and means. Some worked, most didn’t. But I just keep trying. The book sets out the current results of my experiments - you can use them as a jumping-off point to try other ideas. Some may well work better than my solutions.’

You can check out her website at https://www.bloomingthreads.info/