Beautiful Britain - Butterflies

This set is the first of a series of embroidery designs based on the natural history of Britain. Designs of wild flowers, birds and animals will follow at a future date.

The butterfly designs are all as near “life size” as possible, and in colours that are as close to the natural shades as embroidery threads will allow. The embroidery threads used for the originals was Gutermann Dekor rayon. All of the designs were digitised from a set of Victorian watercolours painted in 1870. Sadly, many of the butterflies that were then noted as being “common”, are now very rare, or even extinct in Britain, such as the Venus Fritillary, and some are very localised to just a small area of a single county.

The inspiration for these thirty designs was a charity called S.P.R.I.N.G., (Supporting Parents and Relatives In Neo-natal Grief), who use the butterfly as a symbol of beauty and hope. All thirty butterflies were used to make a “lectern fall”, the hanging that hangs in front of a reading desk in a chapel during an inter-faith memorial service, which embraces all religions and ethnic groups, for babies who, for one reason or another, did not survive birth.

All profits from the sale of the butterfly set will be donated to S.P.R.I.N.G. For more information on this charity, please visit their website at:www.springsupport.org.uk/