#seed head

Plant of the Day

Sunday 28 December 2025

Following the small yellow flowers of Fibigia clypeata (Roman shields) in the summer there is a winter display of oval grey-white seedpods like shields that last all winter. This short lived perennial is hardy and grows well in a free draining soil in full sun.

Lindley’s false silverpuff (Uropappus lindleyi), another wildflower with a fantastical name.

You’d be forgiven if you casually mistook this seed head for a dandelion, as I did for weeks before I stopped to really look at it.

In which I make and then fix a rookie mistake and add a new motif.

“Every person has their own star in the sky. When it goes out, the person dies with it. But no one knows which star is theirs. They are not to be counted or pointed at. Whoever guesses it dies.” — from Agriculture in East Moravia from the Baroque to WWII by ethnographer, Ludvík Kunz

Probably because I just worked a piece that was 42 stitches to the inch and have moved on to one that is 16 stitches to the inch (but possibly because of the massive stress I’ve been living under due to my mother-in-law’s health and other drama), I horribly miscalculated how much room this pattern was going to take up on the cloth. The fabric simply is not big enough to do the pattern as is.

So deep breaths . . .

And adapt.

To make it work I had to remove an entire section and make the two corner pieces come immediately together.

And I came up with something like this:

But then the new and extremely important eight-pointed star/flower motif is all jacked up. 🤦‍♀️

So I made the semi-stupid/semi-confident decision to sketch it out on the fabric itself 😳.

And voila, several hours later:

Where the long vertical line is, is where the missing section would have been located.

And my beautiful, oh so beloved eight pointed star is fixed:

The eight pointed star is very important in Central European and Slavic folk art. While interpretations can vary by region and culture, the motif is widely associated with several core concepts. It’s a protective talisman, used to ward off negative forces and evil spirits. It signifies the creation of life and the union of male and female principles. It also represents perfection, harmony, and order in the world.

I wrote about my history of working with the eight-pointed star here.

In my mind it also represents the wheel of the year:

In the current piece, intended as an altar cloth for work with the ancestors, especially around Provodní and Dušičky, the star stands for the continuation of life, even after death.