Honesty & Heartsease by Jane Nicholas

Some artists stitch flowers; Jane Nicholas has spent decades studying them.

For readers of Inspirations, Jane’s work needs no introduction. Her stumpwork pieces are never simply decorative - they are beautifully stitched specimens, the type a curious natural philosopher might have arranged beneath glass, annotated in Latin, and treasured for life.

Jane’s latest piece, Honesty & Heartsease, appearing in The Handpicked Collection 5, continues this long-established lineage with characteristic confidence and precision, presenting two familiar garden inhabitants.

At first glance, the composition resembles a field sketch pinned to a collector’s board: stems, petals, pods, and insects held in a perfect moment of stillness.

Upon closer inspection however, the project comes to life as if someone has handed you a pair of 3D glasses to look through.

Jane’s magic trick of re-creating nature through her command of needle and thread is suddenly revealed.

The papery seed cases of honesty shimmer like silvery coins, their circular forms floating against the ground fabric with an airy translucence that belies the precision behind them. Each pod begins as a wire outline, overcast with silk thread before being filled with a sheer layer of honey sparkle organza and finished with a characteristic spike formed using a detached picot.

Once stitched, the pods are cut out, their wire tails threaded through the ground and secured from behind. This allows them to sit proud off the surface and achieve the remarkable realism of capturing the fragile opacity of actual honesty seed discs.

Below, the heartsease feature bold, cheery faces constructed petal by petal. Each bloom comprises five individually stitched petals edged with blanket stitch over wire, filled with long and short stitch, and marked with delicate straight-stitch veining in deep violet.

The petals are formed on quilter’s muslin, cut out, and attached sequentially so the flower builds from back to front - just as it grows in the garden. A large French knot at the centre completes the transformation from stitched components to living personality.

The supporting leaves, meanwhile, are shaped using wire and padded before being covered in angled satin stitch, their ribbed veins worked in contrasting greens that give them botanical authority.

And because Jane’s gardens are never devoid of life, the scene is animated by two familiar inhabitants: a buff-tailed bumble bee whose thorax and abdomen are rendered in rows of velvety Ghiordes knots - later combed and trimmed to create plush realism - and a diminutive ladybird perched on a leaf, its wings stitched separately in satin stitch and applied with pinpoint precision.

These tiny visitors are more than ornaments; they are evidence of nature at work.

Taken together, Honesty & Heartsease feels less like a project and more like a page from a naturalist’s notebook - a stitched record of flora quietly observed and faithfully rendered.

It is a reminder of why Jane’s work has captivated stitchers for so many years: not because she shows us something new, but because she shows us what was always there, waiting to be noticed.

If you’d like to see more of Jane’s work, you can do so on her website.

Ready-to-Stitch kits for Honesty & Heartsease are now available and include everything you need to create your own stunning, lifelike botanical study, complete with printed instructions.