embroidery Archives - Page 12 of 19

Century post!

Today is my 100th post on this blog. That includes the little nothing posts, of course, but I’m still going to count it.

Today I’ll share with you Craft Countdown item #6. It occurs to me this one was also not completely from scratch, as I had made the tracing and transferred it to wash-away embroidery paper prior to New Year’s Eve.

If you don’t know who that is, get thee to a library or book store and look up Richard Scarry, who owns the copyright. I couldn’t relocate the specific source of this particular Lowly Worm image, unfortunately, and the colors I’d written down didn’t really make sense to me, so I used a mishmash of the colors from the books I did have accessible. This was easily the most time-consuming of the ten projects, but well worth it.

Simple cross-stitch patterns

I went through a phase some time ago of cross-stitching personalized gifts for people, often with my own designs. Some were in-jokes, some I no longer have the patterns to, and some were not really good enough to share, but I have a couple to show you. The first is an old-fashioned desktop computer:

I have the pattern available as a jpg should you want to make one yourself. There are no markings for the solid-color regions; the backstitching and keyboard keys are shown, and the rest is filling in appropriate regions. I wrote a personal message on the screen in backstitch; you can make your message more or less subtle by varying the color contrast. All color numbers are DMC, and of course the selections should be adjusted to your taste.

The one I have to share that I am more proud of, however, is the following.

The camera and ticket may be stitched together or separately; the pattern specifies DMC color numbers, but you merely need black and dark yellow of some flavor.

SF in stitches

This is my entry to the Feelin’ Stitchy “Covered in Stitches” embroidery contest. I love the covers of 60s and 70s (and even some 50s and 80s) science fiction books – all lurid colors and crazy images. This was the only one on my shelf I felt I had any chance of doing justice to, though:

I am so pleased with how it came out.

I just stitched without any grand plan, and couldn’t have foreseen how well his hand would come together.

My other favorite detail is his left shoulder; I love how the threads blended and it looks like abstract art.

Of course, I have since discovered that the colors on my copy were not as vivid as they had been originally and in particular some formerly different colors had become indistinguishable from each other. However, it still looks good to me.

To make this, I first made three or so blown-up color copies on my home printer. Then I just pinned one to my fabric and started cutting out sections. Here’s a shot near the beginning:

And here’s a shot of when I finally started thinking, “maybe this will actually work.”

And it did!