For a while now, I’ve been hinting about a project I’ve been working on that I wanted to show you soon.

And Soon has finally arrived! Yay!

I’ve been working on a collection of “smalls.” Smalls are little pieces of embroidery or other needlework that usually get finished into (small) things.

I’ve called this collection of four smalls A Thousand Flowers. It’s a group of four tapestry smalls featuring animals set in a floral background, all as a nod to my favorite pieces of textile art that we chatted about the other day.

The title A Thousand Flowers hails from the French mille fleur. The mille-fleur backgrounds of medieval tapestries are delightful! And they don’t belong solely to the medieval age. Check out tapestries from the Arts & Crafts era, and you will find that Morris and his contemporaries, leaning toward medieval themes, incorporated this same background approach in their own textile art. A different stylization, perhaps, but no less abundantly floral!