The Wind is Wild with Flowers - A Mother's Day Provincial Embroidery

“Dans chaque point, il y a une part de mon cœur, de ma terre, et de ma mère.”  

— Anonymous Provençal embroiderer, early 20th century “In every stitch, there is a part of my heart, my land, and my mother.” 

Photo by Nicole Feller-Johnson

Traditional French Provincial  

embroidery, also known as Broderie  Provinciale, refers to specific  

embroidery styles that originated in  the rural regions of southern France,  particularly Provence. My mother,  Miss Carol, loves French food and  French Provincial cooking and kitchen styles. I decided to create this lovely  freehand and tambour embroidered  tea towel for her, as a Mother’s Day Gift.  

Typically, Broderie Provinciale is stitched on linen or cotton using silk and cotton  threads, and techniques include surface embroidery stitches such as stem stitch, chain  stitch, satin stitch, and French knots, worked with precision to create depth and texture.  The tea towel I created here uses a Sajou pink windowpane plaid 100% linen tea towel  base, and is embroidered using a combination of Claudia handpainted 50/50 silk/wool  yarn in pink/peach/yellow and standard heavyweight mercerized 100% pearl cotton in  a muted olive. Miss Carol is a ballet teacher, and she loves pink! The delicate tambour  script was created using a fine French tambour hook and ultra-high twist cotton sewing  thread, also in a ballet pink color. This piece was freehand embroidered at first using  no hooping, and then very tightly hooped after the florals were complete, to add the  tambour script stitching.  

Broderie Provinciale is characterized by its delicate, natural motifs, such as  flowers and vines, and sometimes includes regional symbols and folk patterns. Historically, the designs reflected the embroiderer’s local heritage and were commonly 

Courtesy of  the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

used to embellish household linens, garments, and decorative textiles, preserving  cultural identity and artistry across generations. The women who created these embroideries were largely rural artisans, working in the home as part of their daily lives. These embroiderers were wives, mothers, and daughters living in tight-knit farming communities throughout Provence and other southern regions of France. Embroidery was both a skill and a cultural heritage, passed from mother to daughter as part of a young woman’s preparation for marriage, motherhood, and managing a household. While many of these women were not formally trained or educated in embroidery, they learned through observation and repetition, mastering stitches from a young age through imitation, and often innovating their own variations within the family or the village styles. Their work was deeply personal embroideries might include monograms, local flora and fauna, or regional symbols creating textile decoration while telling the stories about their lives.

While drawing on the Provincial tradition of structured embroideries, I allowed myself to modernize and go a little wild  in the floral design! For this project, I chose to work in a freehand embroidery method, without too much planning or marking, and let my imagination and intuition guide the floral design. Starting the flowers with centers of gathered French knots, I moved outward to the freehand petal satin stitches, and continued outward to stitch the vines  and small berries and flowers. Instead of a traditional stem stitch, I used a back stitch  for the vines, as the fabric/thread combination was too stiff to support a fluid stem  stitch at the desired stitch length. The large center flower represents my mother,  blossomed in all her glory, and the two smaller flower buds represent my sister and I, not yet fully bloomed. The vines that grow out from these flowers represent the many  women and girls whose lives my mother touches, and all the beauty she brings to the  world. 

To add even more French flavor to this  Broderie Provinciale, I handwrote the phrase “le vent est sauvage ave des fleurs”, which translates to “the wind is wild with flowers” and used a reverse tambour (chain stitch oriented to the front of the fabric) for the lettering. I love the idea of seeds blowing away from the original flower, to fall to the  ground and create new life!  

This text was first lightly marked using a Bohin chalk pencil in my own handwriting, and then stitched carefully while the piece was tightly hooped, keeping enough tension on the fabric to allow the tambour hook to create tiny stitches on this slightly more rustic linen weave. Special attention was paid to turning the corners of each character, in order 

to create a delicate yet readable script. The strong crossgrain in this linen helped me keep the text aligned, and provided just the right base for this careful task. It was difficult to execute, but worth it in the end! 

Photo by Nicole Feller-Johnson

I was inspired to create this Mother’s Day gift to honor the woman who has  taught me to go out in the world and bring beauty to those around me. My own mother is highly creative and has passed her artistic gifts to my sister and I (and  hundreds of other little ballerinas!). Like the Provençal embroiderers, I have attempted  to tell a tiny piece of the story of Miss Carol with this design. As did the Provençal mothers, our mothers teach us many things by example, and we grow from imitating  our mothers’ skills to innovating for ourselves; we make new stitches, and we allow the  winds of creativity to help us spread beauty, new ideas, and to plant new seeds of  inspiration. I hope this embroidery will inspire you to create something in honor of your own mother and add your own Provincial style floral embroidery to a long and beautiful  history!