Strawberry Embroidery

I just finished the stitching for this strawberry design. This motif is part of my Strawberries embroidery pattern set.

The swirly vine is stitched with Back Stitch.  The strawberry blossoms petals are done in Straight Stitch and the blossom centers are Satin Stitch.  The red accent dots are French Knots:

The Strawberry is formed with Long and Short Stitch, the pink seeds are formed with Fly Stitch and the stem is Straight Stitch:

I really like the color palette used on this project.  Here are the floss color numbers: 

DMC 3801 Very Dark Melon Pink

DMC 3823 Ultra Pale Yellow

DMC 15     Very Light Parrot Green {discontinued} 

DMC 893   Carnation Light Pink 

DMC 3894 Apple Green, 

DMC 666   Bright Red 

Strawberries Embroidery

Stitching complete!  If you follow my Instagram account, you may have seen my work in progress picture of this project:

I used a motif from the Strawberries embroidery pattern set:

I love this particular motif  {I have also stitched it up in all pinks ~ you might remember this one from a few years ago}:  

This time around, I did a more colorful version. Another difference is that I did most of the stitching this time with perle cotton floss instead of the six strand cotton floss.

I recorded all the information in my Embroidery Journal.  I like to look back over this journal and see how long these projects take from start to finish!

Here are the floss color numbers I used:

I made some embroidered Christmas presents...

I have some Christmas presents to show that I have just finished embroidering. (Kathy & Mark and Karen do not read any further and definitely don't look at the pictures!!!) I just completed these three linen tea towels:This red towel is for my sister Karen who has a beautiful red kitchen. I used some of the flower patterns from the Tea embroidery pattern packet. I used the chain stitch for the border and flower center, french knots and back stitch for the petals:For my sister Kathy, I made this black towel with the green and lavender border. This pattern is one of the border patterns from the strawberries pattern packet. I love the way this looks - I know Kathy will too!
For my brother-in-law Mark I made this tea towel:
You might recognize the chevron stitch that I used to make a nice looking border:

Mark makes the absolute best espresso! He always makes me a latte :)
I made all of these towels from linen fabric. Karen and Mark's are 100% linen and Kathy's is a linen/cotton blend. It was a new experience for me to stitch on these because they were a much looser weave than I am used to! I had so much fun with these and now I can wrap them up!

Strawberry Pillow - Completed!

I finished my strawberry pillow: This was a really fun and very quick project. I made a small pillow pattern that fit one of the images in the strawberry embroidery pattern packet.

For the back of the pillow, I stitched together a sort of patchwork quilt:

I love the way it turned out. To fill the pillow, I used loose polyester fill. It really made for a nice puffy pillow!

100 Stitches - Flat Stitch

Next up on the 100 Stitches endeavour is the flat stitch. Here it is making up this Dr. Seuss-like flower: You may recognize this flower image from the strawberries embroidery pattern packet. This is the flower increased in size by 250%. Sure makes it easy to see for this demonstration :) Rather than my regular floss, I am using dmc #4180 variegated pink perle cotton floss! I think this floss will look neater and be easier to see in my close-up stitch pictures. I am stitching this on a light weight 100% cotton fabric and using a #24 chenille needle. Notice this blue pencil?
This is to mark some stitching lines. 100 Stitches suggests that you draw two lines down the center of the shape you are filling to act as stitching guide lines and to designate the size of the stitch. Hmmm...let's hope I will be able to see these lines well enough!
The first step is to come up through your fabric on one edge of the shape: Now go down through the fabric at the farthest stitching guide line and come back up through the fabric at the edge of your shape: 100 Stitches stresses that this is all about stitching alternately on each side of the shape you are filling. The needle is always coming up through the fabric on the outside line of the shape. So now you pull the thread through and put your needle back down on the far stitching guide line and back up on the outside line of the shape:
And then back again:
Just keep alternating side to side. The stitches should be close together and overlap each other:
Just keep going until the shape is filled!
Repeat for each petal, add some back stitch around the center and put in some french knots and you have:

This stitch is very easy and really fun to do! It is stitch #10 and is in the Flat Stitches section of 100 Stitches.

strawberry pillow wip and some garden pictures

I am working on a pillow project! I started out with this simple embroidery of a strawberry. This is from the strawberry embroidery pattern packet. I stitched SO MANY french knots! The whole strawberry, stem, and flower center are all filled with french knots. For the red, I used dmc #321, the yellow is dmc #726 and the green is dmc #907. I used the split stitch to outline the strawberry, back stitch for the lettering and the stem and flower petal outlines. This will be the front of the pillow.
I am planning on making the back of the pillow a quilted panel! And by quilted, I mean small squares sewn together in a patchwork pattern :)
I am going to use this sweet strawberry fabric, first seen here and some white squares too. I plan to sew the front and back together with this beautiful green rick-rack as the trim. I will post my progress pictures on this as I go along, but in the meantime, I also wanted to share some beautiful flower pictures. We are having a really wet spring - very typical for the pacific northwest! Everything is so green and pretty. This is a chive flower in my herb garden:

Two years ago, for my birthday, I received these amazing allium bulbs. I have purple - which always bloom first:
and white - which is almost in bloom:
I am developing a new flower bed outside my shop/garden shed and I started these foxglove plants from seed! I also have several foxglove plants in this bed that are native to this area. The native plants always have a pinky-lavender flower. I wanted some other colors too so I bought a multicolored seed packet and now I have white to pale pink and a beautiful yellow. I love these plants and so do the bees!

Strawberries!

I have a new pattern packet available in my Etsy shop. It is called strawberries. The picture above is a work in progress I am doing on one of the patterns from the packet. Below is a picture of a completed tea towel featuring the main pattern. I love how this turned out. You might notice that I hemmed the towel with an easy running stitch.in the my running stitch.






This is a picture of what the pattern packet looks like. It is 10 pages with tons of fun designs!






I also wanted to post these pictures of some old needle packages. My grandma and great-grandma had a lot of embroidery and sewing supplies and it is always fun to look through their old items - I love the packaging on this:


on the back of the package is the price .19 cents! And this package: lots of the needles are still inside and all in beautiful colored foil -

and finally this so sweet little puppy "spool pet" to put on a thread spool - this puppy was one in a series - the package says you can get the rest by sending 4 cents in stamps!