Californica 2023- May California Goldfields

For May I'm working on the Lasthenia californica also known as California goldfields.

California goldfields have infloresences for flower heads, which is trippy! An inflorescence is a flower that is made up of many flowers, but the idea that just the flower head is an inflorescence is quite the idea. I find this so fascinating because the petals make it seem like it's one flower. After doing a little digging I learned that the name for this type of infloresence is capitulum. Some examples of flowers of the capitulum variety are: California goldfields (of course), peace lilies, daisies, sunflowers, sedges, and spurges. For more information, check out this Wikipedia page. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudanthium

So the California goldfield is about 1 inch across and has many yellow disc florets surrounded by about 10 small ray florets that look to me like petals. I love how it looks like this flower is all one yellow! I've really debated about how to do this flower. I have two idea, which I'll detail in the plan section.

Here are the plans:

Colors: DMC 310, 444, 471, 703

Flower Head (A): Padded satin stitch overlaid with needlelace- 2-3 strands of 444. I recently encountered are a new way to do a padded stitch, when I was doing Mary Corbet's Key to My Heart pattern. I was really taken with it and decided to try it here. With three strands of 444 do a stem stitch, starting on the outline of the flower head and then continue the stem stitch as you fill in the head in a circular pattern. Then do a satin stitch over the top of all the surface satin stitches in three strands of 444. To make the needlelace over the satin stitch, couch three strands of 444 along the bottom edge of the flower head. Then do a detached buttonhole stitch. You'll need to do that across the couched strands and then again over the buttonhole stitch, row after row until the flower head has been covered. Then couch the edges of the needlelace around the flower head.

Petals [Ray florets] (B): Woven Picot Stitch- 3 strands of 444

Stem (C): Whipped chain stitch- do the chain stitch in 3 strands of 703, then whip only the left side in 3 strands of 471 (This is also a technique I encountered in Mary Corbet's Key to My Heart pattern.)

Name: Backstitch- 2 strands of 310

Box: Split stitch- 2 strands of 310, but maybe you want to save this for after you've completed more months to get a nice even stitch across months...

Alternatively, you could do the following.

Colors: DMC 310, 444, 703, 742

Flower Head (A): French knots- 3 strands of 444 mixed in with 3 strands of 742 (If you want to get super fancy, I would say look at the color photo and do the 742 French knots to add depth to the flower head. If you look you can see a little shadowed part and doing the French knots in 742 there would help created the illusion of dimensionality.)

Petals [Ray florets] (B): Satin Stitch- 3 strands of 444

Stem (C): Long short stitch- 3 strands of 703

Name: Backstitch- 2 strands of 310

Box: Split stitch- 2 strands of 310, but maybe you want to save this for after you've completed more months to get a nice even stitch across months...

 

 This is what mine looks like!!!