Country Garden Stitchery

  I made a patchwork pillow with one of my tulip hand embroidery designs this afternoon.  Sometimes I don't sew my embroidery projects right away because I'm not sure what I want it to be or I don't have the fabrics I want to use yet.  I have a drawer full of fabric scraps so I picked out a few, mostly green, scraps to work with.  There is a lot of pink and lavender in the design so I guess I wanted to bring out the greens.  It was a spontaneous project...     I put 2" strips on both sides of the embroidery piece and then made a strip of five 4" long strips about 2" wide and trimmed it on each end so it would match the embroidered piece.  I usually use 1/4" seams.  Then I put another strip on the end a little longer than my pillow form.  I usually lay the sewn piece on top of the pillow to measure, pretty easy and works good for me.  Then I added a 2" strip to the top and bottom the same length ...

  I started a series of birth month flower cross stitch projects this year and  I'm almost finished with May Lily.  I'm a little behind schedule because I've been illustrating a children's book for my mom.  It is a family project and I wanted to get the paintings done this summer so the book will be ready by Christmas.  I'll post about it when it is done!  I'm excited to see it.     Now that I have more time I want to design a Halloween embroidery pattern.  Halloween is one of my favorite holidays to design for.  I went shopping at one of our local quilt shops this morning and found some great Halloween fabrics.  I love the witch and her purple cauldron in the first fabric.  I got some dots, cobwebs and the last fabric is black with great creepy eyes everywhere.  I can't wait to work with it.      Mint/aqua fabrics are really popular now and I had a hard time choosing some for my fabr...

  I visited a new-to-me antique shop last weekend and found this frog pincushion.  I loved him and brought him home.  He's just a little thing, but has big personality.  I love his expression.  I cleaned him up a little and put him on the top of my bookshelf for display.      I also found some rick rack that is fairly thin and had the vintage labels still on the package.  I've been lucky to find some neat additions to my vintage sewing notions collection lately.  I love hunting for them too.      I've started a new "By the Sea" embroidery set and this is the first project I finished.  I think I'll be doing the whole set in purples and greens with a bit of blue.  Ocean colors.  Soothing.    I also found some little notecards and stickers by one of my favorite artists, Patience Brewster.  She has such a great imagination and does lovely watercolors. ...

  I finished my flower girl hand embroidery pattern this week.  It was kind of an experiment for me because I haven't designed many embroidery patterns with people.  I love all the silhouette inspired crafts I've been seeing so I wanted to try this.      I also wanted a simple color palette with blues and yellows.  I chose the darkest blue floss I had ~ Merlin from Weeks Dye Works.  It's a wonderful midnight blue with a touch of purples in spots.    I liked embroidering on the batik fabric because it had a nice watercolor effect in the colors I was using.  I chose to make the daisies blue because the white didn't show up as well as I wanted.     I wanted to finish her as a pillow decoration for my bedroom.  I usually use strips of fabrics to frame the embroidery to the size of the pillow.  This time I attempted a more patchwork look and my shapes matched up pretty w...