The Language of Silk by Laurence Lieblich

8TH MAY 2026 - ASU #524

Every artist has a mother tongue - the medium through which they express themselves most naturally, most fluently, most freely.

For some it is paint on canvas. For others, clay, stone or lens. For Laurence Lieblich, it is silk. And when Laurence speaks in silk, she is positively eloquent.

The Language of Silk from The Handpicked Collection 6 is the latest work from this Swiss-based designer, and its title could not be more fitting.

The projects Laurence produces with needle and thread are less stitched objects and more composed works - verse after verse of colour, chorus after chorus of form, each bloom a carefully chosen word in a language that only the most fluent can write with such confidence and grace.

The subject is a generous bouquet of mixed blooms - peonies, daisies, poppies, violets and more - spilling exuberantly from a blue and white vase onto a ground of vanilla fine linen, finished with brick red piping that gives the cushion its final punctuation mark.

It is the kind of arrangement that stops you mid-scroll, mid-stride, mid-thought. Joyful, abundant, alive.

But look closer and the true artistry reveals itself. The Language of Silk draws on a palette of 67 thread colours - predominantly from the Au Ver à Soie, Soie d'Alger stranded silk range, with two House of Embroidery hand-dyed raw silks adding further texture and lustre.

In lesser hands, a palette of this scale risks chaos. In Laurence's, it is cohesion made spectacular.

The secret lies in her mastery of shading - the patient, painstaking way she moves through tonal families, using long and short stitch, satin stitch and careful blending to give each petal its depth, each leaf its luminosity.

Colour does not clash here; it converses.

The stitch vocabulary is equally rich, ranging from trellis couching on the vase to detached blanket stitch, wheatear stitch and whipped straight stitch among the blooms and foliage - each chosen not for complexity's sake, but because it says exactly what needs to be said.

The Language of Silk also has one more quality - that of being a meditative project. It invites you to slow down, observe, and lose yourself in the graceful language of silk. When the language is this beautiful, you'll want to take your time with every word.

READY-TO-STITCH KIT

Ready-to-Stitch kits for this magnificent project are now available and take the work out of sourcing all 67 different threads Laurence has used.

The kit also includes the piping you need to complete the project as a cushion along with the design pre-printed onto the fabric.