Folk inspired cross stitch pattern

Good morning!

It is a (quite) beautiful Saturday morning here. By "quite" I mean it is not raining - after having 3 days with constant rain, this is a big thing. What is even more, the sun has just peaked out from behind the clouds. Let's hope we can see more of it today. Just my luck, when I have been at home since Tuesday after a minor surgery, could have gone out to walk a bit, but the weather didn't let me. Actually, yesterday I did go out a little, early in the morning, just before it started raining but that wasn't much.

Anyway, I am feeling really good after having my frozen shoulder operated, doing my exercises, and thank God, I can use my arm much better than before. Going back to work on Monday.

I have been working on my university assignments, surprise, surprise. :? I love experimenting with embroidery, I truly do, but I do miss just embroidering for the fun of it. :)

I was trying to create 3-D embroidery. I am using this book (link to Amazon):

I did some coiling, which is basically taking some fabric strips, wrapping them with thread and sewing them together to form a fabric. I made a small basket to learn the technique. I used embroidery thread and blanket stitch to sew the strips together. This can be seen on the inside. But it is quite hard on the fingers to sew through the fabric strips, so I only sewed on one side. This resulted in a little bit unstable fabric. So I turned it inside out and used herringbone stitch and metallic thread on the other side. This way I strengthened the fabric and made it decorative, too. The metallic thread gives it a really good structure, I love it.

Then I realised that for my assignment this is not good enough because I need to connect it to the topic I am working with. This time I choose trees as a symbol. So next I made a small sculpture with the same technique. I also used woven picot stitch to make some leaves.

Right now I am working with another piece, using fabric manipulation. This is supposed to be a vessel, with a tree-trunk as inspiration. I used one flat piece of woollen fabric to create this, pulling the fabric together, folding it and stitching it down. Then I made a lining and used a thick batting between them, to add more structure. This is not done yet, I want to add more stitches to make it sturdier. I am not very sure about it, right now I don't really like it but don't know what I am missing. I think I will put it aside for a few days and come back to it later.

By the time I finished writing this, the sun disappeared again. So it is really high time to bring some cheer in our days, I think. Here is a colourful little pattern to bring you some sunshine. It is inspired by folk embroidery. I made two different versions with different colourways, but of course, as usual, I encourage you to use your favourite colours to stitch it. (As I am looking at them together, now I think that the blue hydrangea might look better with the red tulips and the pink one with the yellow tulips... so typical of me, never really satisfied :D )


Click on the pictures to get the downloadable pdf.

(Good news: I sorted out the problem with the pdf format listing thread that were not used! Yay!)

Happy spring, happy stitching!