❤🧵🎄 Merry Stitchmas! 🎄🧵❤

It's so hard to believe that the Holidays have come around again! Seems like only yesterday I was getting ready for last Christmas 😂 2019 has been another challenging year for me, with serious illness in the family that demanded most of my attention.

Thank you so much to everyone who still reads these posts and has left kind comments, they mean the world to me 💐 Hopefully 2020 will be a better blogging year ☘

Wishing you a Christmas that is Merry & Bright
and a Stitchtacular New Year!

🎄 Stitchy News: Holiday Special 🎄

It's that time of the year again, and the Holiday Rush is upon us! It's the first time in forever that I've done a Stitchy News post, but I have some exciting news to share with you today, including an online stitchy advent calendar and a great giveaway! ❤🎄❤

Mary Corbet of Needle N' Thread is generously running her fabulous A Stitcher's Christmas giveaway series again this year, where she shares top of the line embroidery notions and supplies! She's currently on the 2nd Giveaway, so make sure to visit the website or sign up to her free newsletter (which sends you the blog posts as they are published) to keep up with the giveaways. If you're new to A Stitcher's Christmas, please visit this year's first post for more information on how it all works 😉

It's a super popular series, and there's often hundreds of entries for each giveaway, which can seem discouraging. But I was incredibly fortunate, and won the Inspirations Giveaway from 2017 , so if I can win, you can too! I wasn't blogging at the time so I haven't shared my kit finishes yet but I will soon. It was an incredibly difficult year for me, the first Christmas after my beloved Grandpa died (on Christmas Day 2016) and that prize made me pick up my needle and thread for the first time in over a year, and helped get me through a terrible time. Best of luck to you if you enter ☘

Laura at Bugs and Fishes has a super cute Retro Felt Baubles Tutorial for you, great for making last minute Christmas gifts! If you leave the ornaments unpadded, as Laura mentions, they would also be fabulous for sending in Christmas cards. There's all kinds of possibilities to pull out your embellishment tin and go crazy, and I think these would be a great way to use scraps of pretty trims and edgings!

DMC has a number of free holiday patterns, including this pretty Nordic Heart. It uses two shades of the shimmering new Etoile floss, but would look lovely in a single shade of variegated Coloris too! There's a cute Coloris Christmas Tree freebie as well.

The wonderfully imaginative Jo at Serendipitous Stitching is hosting her annual Online Advent Calendar Blog Hop again this year! The image above is one of my favourite finishes of Jo's, from her very first 2011 Online Advent Calendar 😃 This is such a great event, where stitchers share some holiday themed projects from years past and a bit about their own traditions. Make sure to hop along for some Christmas stitching and finishing inspiration! I look forward to it every year ❤

Finally, if you're looking for a super quick little ornament to whip up in a hurry, why not try my free Blackwork Poinsettia Ornament? It's two-sided, easy to customize, and doesn't need any backing fabric! I also have a full tutorial for the easy Whipped Chain Stitch Edging. This was my contribution to Jo's 2013 Online Advent Calendar.

In February, my friend Shannan from Bobbin & Fred stitched this gorgeous variation, and I had the pleasure of interviewing her about her finish for the blog! This remains one of my favourite patterns and can easily be made in a weekend. If you do stitch up a version, I'd love to see it, and feature you here on the blog if you like! 😊

Are you making like Santa Claus and doing any gift making this year? I don't have mine all lined up yet but I'm thinking about projects - unfortunately, they're all Super Secret!

❤ Whatever you're making for the holidays this year, may your Christmas be Merry & Bright, and may you Jingle All The Way ❤

Gifted Gorgeousness: Floral Blackwork

Happy Easter to you all!!! Best Wishes for a Wonderful Spring :) The days here are getting longer, and we've had a lot of lovely sunny afternoons lately where the light has been bright and perfect for stitching so I've been busy with my needle lately! This has been a welcome surprise, since I'd been in a bit of a slump since Christmas ;) 

Speaking of which, for this post - my first for Jo's great Gifted Gorgeousness SAL for 2016 (if you'd like to join, you can do what I've done and just jump in whenever you want, isn't that wonderful?!) - we're actually going back in time to the Holidays.

It all started when Santa kindly gifted me with the December 2015 issue of JCS...

...and I promptly fell in love with Elizabeth Almond's Blackwork feature, a quartet called "Christmas Treasures", which you can see here:

I choose the design on the far left-hand side, which is a bit of a black sheep in the family as it is lacking some stitch features that the other three Treasures share.

Here's a closer view of the center square (without the floral border):

I just love the very center section with the geometric flowers within octagons! The original designs were charted in red with gold metallic and gold beads, which is a beautiful and classic combination for Christmas, but I wanted something that I could hang up all year around. So I chose a deep burgundy, DMC 3685, for my floss and a beautiful dusky pink -DMC Light Effects E316 - for my metallic:

And I'm very happy with the way it turned out, even though I made a lot of silly counting mistakes and was very frustrated with it for a while :)

Another silly thing - I had left all my stitchy supplies at home because I didn't think I'd get the time to stitch while we were visiting family! Thankfully, due to gifts of needles and thimbles from my Stitchy Guru Mother (who is truly awesome at finding stocking stuffers) and some money from my Groovy Grandparents that I spent in part to buy the fabric and hoop at a local quilt shop, I was able to kit myself out! I actually finished the entire center section shortly after New Year's Day.

And then I hit the Floral Border. That was actually what drew me to the designs in the first place, but while I was stitching one side I realized that the center of the floral sprigs did not align with the points of the center diamond. They were offset by one stitch, and although they were mirrored in the border, this mismatch was all I could see when I looked at the piece. It created a tension that constantly drew the eye, which may have been the the designer's intent, but it wasn't working for me.

So, after a lot of deliberation and a few tries at recharting the sprigs, I decided to give it up and ripped out what I had stitched. And then I took the geometric flower motif from the center square and drew up the border that I used, and although I wasn't sure about it while I was stitching, it ended up being my favourite part of the project!

Here is a close-up of the geometric flower motif from the center:

And here is a close-up of the lovely eight-petal flower that I used in the corners:

I really like the way the center pulled into an eyelet! The fabric is a white 28-count Evenweave, by a brand called Unique that used to manufacture a lot of sewing notions here in Canada (which has largely been taken over by H.A. Kidd). It is lovely to work with, but unfortunately the packaging was older and I suspect that it is no longer available. It came in a flat pack, with a blue insert.

One of the fun things about small independant quilt and fabric stores is that you never know what you might find, but often - as is the case with the store I visited - some of the stock is usually older and may not be in production anymore.

The other changes I made were to not add the beads (gasp! shock!) - I know that's unusual for me, but I didn't have any that matched either thread and I didn't want to add a third colour. But I made up for it by adding lots of the metallic, using it a little differently than the pattern suggested. 

My favourite section to stitch using the metallic thread was the Algerian Eye/Star Stitch checkerboard you can see in this close-up of the center section; it's a super simple fill treatment but the stitch really shows up the shine on the metallic, and this is a great idea that could be adapted to other projects. I tried to show up a bit of that fabulous sparkle in this photo, but it's so much prettier in real life:

And there you have it! I'm not entirely sure how I'm going to final-finish this off yet. I was originally thinking of following the project finishing instructions for the sort of overlarge flatfold ornament with the corded trim, but I may do something different. It's a little bigger than I expected; I started with a 6" Hoopla and had to move up to the 8" you see in the photos.

I also made a little mistake at the beginning - I started working it in hand, because I have always heard that it's harder to get hoop marks out of Evenweave than it is with Aida. But because the center has all these long stitches, the fabric distorted no matter how careful I was, so I bought the hoop and was very glad I did so. When I do get around to finishing it, I think lacing it over mat board will take out any remaining uneveness (at least I hope so!) - and the hoop marks weren't bad at all.

Also, a note to anyone thinking of stitching this design: although most of the stitching is all done with one strand of floss, you use a LOT of it. The only exception is the two mini-borders of cross-stitch, which are done with two strands (and which I chose to outline with added backstitch, using 1 strand, to make the lines more solid).

I only had a few tiny ends left of the burgundy - although I did lose quite a bit of thread ripping out the original floral border - and about 1/3 of the metallic skein left.

Thanks very much for reading! And be sure to hop on over to Jo's annual Easter Blog Hop - follow along at the stops to see lots of lovely Spring-ish stitching and collect the letters for the special mystery phrase! And have a Very Happy Easter :)

Blog News: Due to some Reader Requests (a BIG thank you to those who took the time to write to me with this suggestion), I've added the "Follow by E-mail" function to the blog, over in my Sidebar. If you try it out and have any problems, please let me know!

Season's Greetings!

May Your Holidays Be Merry And Bright :)

I'll be taking a little hiatus from the blog to spend some quality time with family and friends, but I'm very much looking forward to getting back into the Stitchy Swing of Things sometime in the New Year ;) 

Thanks so much for reading and supporting Eglantine Stitchery!

Wishing You and Yours A Wonderful Christmas 

And A Very Happy New Year in 2016!!!

Easy & Fun Embroidered Easter Eggs

Hello, hello! It's so hard to believe that it's officially Spring now :) It still feels very much like Winter here, but the days are slowly getting longer and Mr. Sunshine is happily making more appearances LOL! I've been under the weather on and off since Christmas, so although I had Big Plans to start my Sampler of Samples in January, things have not exactly gone as expected. I'm still thinking about the SOS though!

In the meantime, I've been having a lot of fun experimenting with embellishing felt Easter Eggs with sparkly sequins and beads, and a bit of embroidery too. This is a super easy technique, so if you're looking to quickly whip up some Eastertide Cheer before the Holiday next week, you might want to try this out yourself:

Here are the four Eggs I've made so far! The wonky little pink one on the left was my first attempt, and I should really have cut it up but I didn't have the heart. The felt wouldn't have been reuseable anyway, because the center daisy was so thickly stitched, so now it's serving me as a cheerful festive pincushion :)

Although I measured the flower petal placement, the leaves and the stripes, nothing turned out quite right. I had high hopes for the Herringbone Stitch I attempted at the very top, but it turned out a bit oddly. The daisy is made the same as those in my Floral Umbrella. My favourite part is this interlaced diamond stitch thing I made up:

A quick word about the supplies I used: Unfortunately, I couldn't find any of that magical wool felt locally, so I used dollar store felt. Some colours were thicker than others, with the lavender being the plushest (and therefore easiest to work with) and the dark purple being the thinnest. But I think it worked fine for these small projects.

The thread I used for stitching, the Buttonhole Stitch edging and the Twisted Cording hanging loops is craft thread by Loops & Threads. It's the Michaels brand, and I'll be doing a Review in future. The bright colours are prefect for this time of year!

The pretty pastel sequins are from a container of all kinds of mixed colours and shapes from my Stitchy Guru Mother's stash. They've been around ever since I can remember - they're likely older than I am LOL! It's nice to finally find a way to use them :) The bright colours are from various dollar store assortments - my advice is that if you find some you really like, buy extra because sometimes sequins aren't coloured or punched out right. Look for shapes you can layer, like I did here:

All the sequins are attached with seedbeads. For the lavender Eggs, I used a pretty iridescent white but for the brighter violet Egg, I used silver-lined clear for extra sparkle :) To keep the attachment subtle, I used the quilter's friend, Invisible Thread, but you could use fishing line, or a thread that matches the base of the Egg.

You can see the silver Toho seedbeads I used here; they are super bright and sparkly! For the center band of this Egg, I sewed down a bit of pretty trim. It's a silver metallic lattice threaded with semi-transparent iridescent plastic bands with a greeny-purple flash of colour that is really pretty in person. It's from an assorted all-silver card I bought on sale, for 50 cents a card, at Michaels after Christmas:

These are the different colours I bought, they're called "Midnight Jewel". I was drawn to the metallic rickrack originally, but the rest of the trims are interesting too.

My very favourite Easter Egg is this one, which is my first ever attempt at Ribbon Embroidery! The center flower is a Spiderweb Rose, and I used a thin polyester ribbon in pink and green from WalMart. They were just 50 cents a spool, so it's an economical way to experiment! I really had fun stitching this one - it's a LOT easier than it looks; the leaves are only Lazy Daisies, and the "buds" are French Knots:

I was going to add sequins to this one too, but after I stitched the Rose, I wanted something with a little more texture to match the raised flower:

So I ruched some of the pink ribbon, adding some pretty plastic pink pearls at regular intervals. I used a sewing thread to match the ribbon for this, and it worked out great! I ruched each length as one long stripe and then couched it down across the Egg to secure it. I think this would make a really nice edging too, for something special!

So there you have it! My Eggstravagantic Experiments so far LOL :) I have another lavender felt Egg cut out, so I'll try to finish that up over the weekend. These could easily be adapted to whatever sparklies, beads and other pretties you have around!

I think that about covers the whole process. Oh, to get the shape, I folded a piece of paper in half and cut the half-oval out, Valentine Heart style, and then when I was happy with it I made a cardstock template to use with the felt. You could also print off a blank Egg shape to use - there are tons, like this one from a garland tutorial, online.

If you do decide to make your own Embroidered Easter Eggs, I'd love to see them :)

Another quick project would be the Chicken Scratch Easter Egg I shared last year:

Please note that you do NOT have to create an account to download the freebie; just "x" out of the New to Dropbox screen, and then you can view and download the .PDF like normal. If you have any trouble, just e-mail me (my address is in the sidebar, under the pretty postage stamps). Enjoy, and Have a Very Happy Easter!!!

Merry Christmas!

Best Wishes for A Very Merry Christmas 

and a Wonderful New Year!!!

Happily, I'm taking a little break to visit with family, but I'm greatly looking forward to catching up with all my favourite blogs and stitchers in 2015!

Don't forget to visit The 2014 Online Advent Calendar at Serendipitous Stitching to see some stitchy holiday goodness! There's still two days left to go.

I participated for the first time last year, and I made a free Blackwor Poinsettia Ornament with Finishing Tutorial that is perfect for some last minute stitching:

Click on the photo to go to the post and download the pattern :)

Important: I just noticed that the Dropbox site that hosts the file now comes up with a pop-up window asking you to sign it - you do not have to sign in to view or download the pattern - just click the "x" in the corner! Sorry for any confusion.

If you don't have the time to stitch both sides, either design would be nice on its own!

Exciting News: Jo is also hosting a new SAL this year called Gifted Gorgeousness:

Just click on the button to read all about it and sign-up if you wish! I think this is a wonderful incentive to stitch all that Very Special Stash that has been gifted to you. I've joined in myself with the great casual monthly drop-in option! I've been very fortunate to have received some lovely stitchy gifts over the last few years, and I'm hoping to squeeze in at least one or two among the Sampler of Samplers next year :)

Happy Holidays!!! Hope Santa is Good To You ;)

SFS #10: Happy Hallowe'en Haunting!!

I'm so happy to be able to share my very first Hallowe'en stitchery ever with you today!!! But before we get there, I'd thought I'd better do a little explaining:

In the past, the only season I stitched for was Christmas :) Although it's still my favourite, over the last year or so I've come to really enjoy having a small seasonal ornament or two to hang on my wall to cheerfully remind me of the time of the year.

I know it sounds a little bit frivolous, but I really enjoy making these small projects that come together more quickly ;) One of my favourite things to do for any holiday is to decorate, and making these stitcheries into ornaments means that I can easily pack them away once the season is over and change them out for something new.

Which is also an excellent reason to start a new project LOL! My Autumn "Harmony" Variation definitely has a spooky feel - with the owls and grinning jack-o-lanterns and all - that's totally in tune with Hallowe'en, but I felt like I was missing something.

And then, suddenly, it struck me one day - I was missing the Hallowe'en Cuteness!!!

This kind of Hallowe'en Cuteness :) As long as I can remember until well into my teens, every Hallowe'en began for my family when the air got chill, the nights started to grow long, the leaves began falling - and the window decorations went up ;)

This Witch and her Kitty was one of the ones we had (I was so excited to find a picture online!), and all were this kind of heavy paper, flocked with velvet powder on one side (the vivid black and pink on the left) and unadorned on the other (the right). The plain side lay flat against the glass, with the velvet side facing into the room.

Most of our decorations featured a black Kitty, and the flocking powder made it feel like she had real fur :) They were all designed in the same style, and now that I think of it, each one featured a pair of characters - the Scarecrow with a Raven, the green-skinned Witch in the purple hat and her Bat, the Ghost with the Jack-O-Lantern.

This is rather a remarkable coincidence given that I stitched a pair of friends too:

This is my version of "Happy Halloween Friends"...

...from "Pat Olson's Spooky Stuff", Leisure Arts Leaflet #2730:

I was fortunate to thrift this booklet a few years ago, but some of the designs are still available as divided digital downloads from Leisure Arts - from top to bottom at the right: "Happy Halloween","Boo To You!" and "No Tricks, Just Treats". I've always enjoyed the Pat Olson line of designs - especially the Christmas ornaments - because her graphics are cute and cartoony but have some shading to them for depth.

As you've probably noticed, I made a few changes :) I loved the Pumpkin and Ghost, but wasn't sure about the Bat or the Wonky Stars at first, and I really didn't like the way the lettering crowded everything together on the left side. So I used graph paper to plan out new lettering - adding the apostrophe in "Hallowe'en" because I've always preferred it like that - based on the original. I also darkened the purples, to make them look a little spookier, and I decided to leave out the Bat altogether in the end.

So I started stitching the parts I was sure about first, and added in the rest:

Starting with the Friends (I made a few changes to the face of the Pumpkin and added the Surprised Eyebrows for extra Cuteness), I then stitched the lettering (with added Exclamation Mark!), and finally the Wonky Stars. I really wasn't sure about those, and had major doubts even as I was stitching, but the more I put in, the more I liked them until the real problem was finding somewhere to stop LOL!

It was in part to distract myself from squeezing in more small stars that I decided to add a border :) On my graph, I had drawn it in as the sewing line for my ornament. I knew that it would be a big ornament from the start, when I decided to use 14 count Aida instead of something smaller (I used three strands of floss for the cross-stitch by the way, which is my usual on 14), but after I added the striped border I knew I would have to finish it another way, which worked out even better than I had hoped!

Here are some directions if you want to try the Whipped Backstitch Border yourself:

Please click on the photo to view it larger in another window :)

This border was so easy and quick to do once I got the hang of it!!! And I really love the look - in this case, the extra orange and black was just what I needed to add a bit more Spooky Cuteness and rein in all those free-floating Wonky Stars LOL. This is definitely a technique I want to try again, especially with white and red for Candy Cane stripes at Christmas ;) If the instructions aren't clear, please let me know!

These two make me go "Awwww!" whenever I look at them LOL!

My SFS Spending for October, Month #10:

Um, would you believe nothing? For the fourth month in a row?! I know, it's some kind of miracle. The frame is an inexpensive one (seriously, $1.00) from the dollar store that I've had lying around for ages. It's only plastic, but the black and the clean lines were just what I needed, and I didn't have to feel bad about hot-gluing a bit of quilt batting to the back of the frame to keep the the stitching in place :)

This was a quick-and-dirty framing job, not an heirloom affair, so I just folded the edges of the Aida (which were nice and stiff) and finger-creased them in place, laid it on the quilt-batting-bedecked back and sandwiched the whole thing together. Snap!

So I have the entire monthly total of $25.00 to add to my Bank, for a grand total of $172.03 Banked :) So I did manage to make it over the $150 saved mark!

Granted, this is entirely because I *still* haven't got my Christmas Gift Stitching sorted out yet (eek!) so I need to hustle on that that, double-quick. Christmas is coming closer everyday after all...now, how's that for scary?! LOL :)

And finally, I just can't resist sharing this Super Spooky Cute vintage card that popped up during that search for my old window decorations -

Wherever and Whoever you Haunt this Hallowe'en, be Happy! ;)